Routledge rides alone
Date: 2024-04-05T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: War correspondents -- Fiction; Liaoyang; Battle of; China; 1904 -- Fiction; International relations -- Fiction

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Title: Routledge rides alone

Author: Will Levington Comfort

Illustrator: Martin Justice

Release date: April 5, 2024 [eBook #73334]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: A. L. Burt Company, 1910

Credits: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROUTLEDGE RIDES ALONE ***

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

PROLOGUE |
In Cheer Street, London | 9
FIRST CHAPTER |

Mother India Is Said to be Quivering with
Hatred for Her White Child, the British
Foundling

30

SECOND CHAPTER |

The Baffling Indian Mystery Is Discussed by
Four Men Who Should Have Been First to
Solve it

42

THIRD CHAPTER |

Routledge Relates How a Master Came Down
from the Goodly Mountains to Find His Chela
in the Burning Plains

51

FOURTH CHAPTER |

Routledge Contemplates the Past in the Midst
of a Shadow Forecast by Large Events

65

FIFTH CHAPTER |

Routledge Steps Out Spiritedly in the Fog to
Find His Friends, and Encounters the Hate of
London

74

SIXTH CHAPTER |

A Grim and Terrible Tradition Is Touched Upon
for the Relation it Bears to the Treachery in
India

85

SEVENTH CHAPTER |

Routledge Begs for a Stimulant—the Stuff
that Sings in the Veins of Kings

104

EIGHTH CHAPTER |

The Superlative Woman Empties Her Heart of
Its Treasures for the Outcast, and They Part
at Charing Cross

110

NINTH CHAPTER |

Mr. Jasper is Informed that Mother India
Caused Napoleon’s Defeat, and that Famines
Are Not Without Virtue

124

TENTH CHAPTER |

A Singular Power Is Manifest in the Little
Hut at Rydamphur, and Routledge Perceives
His Work in Another War

139

ELEVENTH CHAPTER |

A Hand Touches the Sleeve of the Great Frieze
Coat in the Wintry Twilight on the Bund at
Shanghai

148

TWELFTH CHAPTER |

Johnny Brodie of Bookstalls is Invited to
Cheer Street, and Bolts, Perceiving a Conspiracy
Formed Against Him

164

THIRTEENTH CHAPTER |

Jerry Cardinegh Offers a Toast to the Outcast
and Is Compelled to Drink Alone

175

FOURTEENTH CHAPTER |

Routledge is Assured of a Woman’s Love—though
He Should Lead the Armies of the
World to burn London

187

FIFTEENTH CHAPTER |

Noreen Cardinegh Appears After Midnight in
the Billiard-room of the Imperial—an Ineffable
Remembrance

200

SIXTEENTH CHAPTER |

Certain Civilians Sit Tight with Kuroki, while
the Blood-Flower Puts Forth her Bright
Little Buds

211

SEVENTEENTH CHAPTER |

Feeney and Finacune are Privileged to “Read
the Fiery Gospel Writ in Burnished Rows of
Steel.”

222

EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER |

Bingley Breaks Away from the Camp of the
Civilians to Watch “the Lean-Locked Ranks
Go Roaring Down to Die.”

232

NINETEENTH CHAPTER |

Noreen Cardinegh, Entering a Japanese House
at Eventide, is Confronted by the Visible
Thought-Form of Her Lover

243

TWENTIETH CHAPTER |

Routledge Is Seen by Noreen Cardinegh at an
Exciting Moment in Which She Dare not Call
His Name

255

TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER |

Routledge, Brooding upon the Mighty Spectacle
of a Japanese Bivouac, Traces a World-War
to the Leak in One Man’s Brain

266

TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER |

Routledge Strikes a Contrast Between the
Japanese Emperor and the Japanese Fighting-man,
while Oku Charges into a Blizzard of
Steel

277

TWENTY-THIRD CHAPTER |

Routledge Encounters the “Horse-killer” on
the Field of Liaoyang, and They Race for the
Uncensored Cable at Shanhaikwan

285

TWENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER |

The Great Frieze Coat and the Woman Journey
Down the Coast Together, and Cross India to
the Leper Valley

303

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.

Here, in his own world-yard again, walking for an hour through the centre of London, and not a human had hailed him. The strokes of ten boomed down from some spire lost in the muffling mists.

“One would have to carry a lantern, like the old prophet of the barrel-house, to find his playmates in a night like this. Besides,” he added, “most of my playmates by this time are bathing in the vanities across the Square.”

There was a herd of carriages at the entrance to the famous ball-room; and under the awnings he encountered the quick, natty figure of the much-liked Finacune—seized the shoulders of the little man affectionately.

“Hello, old heart—my first glimpse of a white man in the Home-zone——”

Finacune turned in an abrupt, unnerved way. “Why, how d’ do, Routledge?” he mumbled throatily. His right hand had jerked toward the other from habit, but was withdrawn without the clasp. “How d’ do? Comin’ in, I s’pose?”

With this astonishing greeting, the Word man leaped up the stone steps and left his “mystic of the wars” beneath the dripping canopy, not a little perturbed. The rather intent regard of the cab-starter pulled Routledge from his reflecting after a moment, and he followed Finacune into the Hall, being shown at once to the gentlemen’s coat-room. Apparently Finacune had shed his outer garment with incredible speed, for he was not there; nor any other guests. Routledge’s first thought was that a joke was being perpetrated at his expense, Finacune’s action merely preparing the way, but he could not hold fast to this. His whole nature was sensitive at once to a formidable disorder.

His name trembled above the sense-stirring music as he stepped upon the floor of the brilliant hall. It was a distinguished company of admirals, generals, civilian campaigners, and exalted representatives of the Home, Foreign, and Colonial Departments; the bravest men of the kingdom, perhaps; certainly some of the fairest women. The throng moved about in a slow, suppressed way; and the faces turned toward him not gladly, not pointedly, but in a quick, secretive, on-the-defensive fashion, as upon some huge agent of menace and craft.

With difficulty, Routledge controlled the muscles of his face. The public speaker knows the moment. Here is straightforward testimony of the power of mind over matter. That first volume of abhorrence and distrust which his eyes had ever met, seemed to rub out his features and weave its own image upon the flesh. He never forgot the sensation. Women craned their heads behind the shoulders of the men. A steward passed before him, fell into the current of hatred, and his face altered visibly. Routledge summoned all his resistance and smiled. He understood instantly that only a few of the men, the most valued tools of the kingdom, knew the specific allegation, and that by the others he was charged with some dreadful generality. Finacune had disappeared. Jerry Cardinegh had not arrived. Trollope, that goodly bullock of a man, most slow of all to be blown in a gale of popular opinion, stood nearest to Routledge. The two faced each other fixedly.

“I say, brother, what’s up?” Routledge inquired lightly.

“I was thinking of interviewing you on the matter—not for publication, of course, but for my own curiosity,” was the puzzling answer.

Routledge quickly stepped forward, but Trollope turned away.

Burling-Forster, an artillery chieftain, whose valor, years before at Quetta, had vividly been placed before the British people by Routledge, the only civilian detached with him at the time, took the place of Trollope now and stared with steady, stony insolence, an accomplishment of Englishmen only, at the man who had made him famous. He did not move to take the hand which Routledge was careless enough to offer him. However, Burling-Forster uttered a sentence which showed that he quite forgot that there were women in the room.

There was not a shade of change now in the brown hue of Routledge’s face, nor in the pleasure of his smile.

“Colonel, I once saw your temper working to better effect,” he said courteously.... “Feeney,” he remarked, turning to the grim visage of the old man, “perhaps you may tell me—am I out of order to inquire what this game is?”

“It appears to me,” Feeney answered gloomily, “that you are out of order anywhere.”

“Thank you—I didn’t know.”

It was now the turn of Dartmore, the editor of the Review. As has been related, it had been the recent vocation of Routledge to make this newspaper important in and between wars. To be insulted by Dartmore was like being thrown from a horse into a hedge of Spanish-bayonets.

“I am glad that you were crafty enough not to call at the Review office to-day, though you’ve got hell’s own audacity to come here. Don’t go to the Review for your cheque. I will see to it that it is brought to the Rubicon Buffet within an hour. I advise you to buy something with it to kill yourself.”

A tall figure in evening wear brushed by Routledge now, rather roughly and without apology. It was Bingley, of the Thames. For an instant Routledge was blinded—the Hindus name it well—by the red mists of passion. He had drilled himself to bear the words, had listened coldly, curiously, for the past few moments, but the actual physical contact unleashed his rage.

“I shouldn’t advise him to kill himself until he is well clear of the shores of England, Dartmore—the taint, you know!” Bingley said with a brassy smile.

The face of a woman hurrying toward him through the breathless groups in the great reception hall pulled Routledge out of delirium.

“Bingley,” he remarked, shutting his eyelids forcibly, as if to expel the rheum of anger, “I’ll bear in mind your suggestion.”

The editor turned his back upon his prince of servants, as routine men frequently dare to do. A butler stood by Routledge with the great frieze coat. The air became electric with whisperings. The whole company was intent upon a matter, the nature of which only a handful knew. But the others discussed it in awed, hungry eagerness—in that deplorable, hungerish way of lesser folk who are enabled to forget their own limitations by the spectacle of one of the mighty fallen. Routledge swung into his outer garment, smiling strangely....

Then the ladies of the kingdom gasped and the valiants stared. A lady broke in through the narrowing circle and ran to the outcast—a wondrous Irish lady of red-gold hair and pale gold silk. Her hand fell upon the sleeve of his great-coat, and her face, the masterpiece from the famous gallery of Erin, was upturned proudly but pitifully to his.

“They won’t tell me—they speak of treachery, but no one dares to tell me—what is this horrid mistake?” she demanded.

The sudden look of tenderness in Routledge’s eyes gave way to fear and pain. The others had stepped back.

“Run away, you blessed girl,” he whispered. “Something big is wrong. I seem to understand it least of all—but its plain I’m bad medicine here now. It will all come out. Meanwhile, don’t be seen with me, Noreen!” He added in the shadow of a whisper, “Your father——”

“Father will be here to-night. He brought me to the door, promising to be back within an hour. I think he went to find you. Oh, he’s changed—more than I feared! But you, Routledge-san——”

“Please leave me. You are assailing your position by talking with me. That hurts worse than anything these people might say. I shall go out and think it over.... Good-night, Noreen, my dear friend.”

But she clung to his arm. “What do I care what they think of me? I want you to know—you must know when you are alone—that there is one woman who will stand by you, through all things!”

Her words were not lost to the periphery of the crowd. He drew back stoutly, but his heart sank when she added even more loudly: “Remember, you have one friend—even though all your brave companions fail!”

His lips moved with the words: “Dear Noreen—say no more.”

“Remember me!” came back to him.

For an instant she watched as he turned to the door—lineage to Plantagenet and stuff of angels warm in her heart. The other women fathomed his attempt to shield her from them and from her own impulsiveness. What they thought of his gallantry they did not tell; but what they thought of Noreen Cardinegh was revealed in jewelled combs and in the elaborate artistry of back-hair which met her eyes when she turned once more to the hall.

“Mighty brave of you, I’m sure, Miss Cardinegh,” said Bingley, stepping to her side. “I should like to have a friend so loyal. But you’re wrong this time, really——”

“Even so, Mr. Bingley, I shall trust to my own judgment,” she answered, moving swiftly into the throng, where he did not essay to follow.

Routledge had not missed the attitude of the Hall toward her. The tempest of abhorrence, though a new and very wonderful brand of battle, did not shatter his philosophy, but the slight which his champion was enduring for his sake—this was grim hell in his heart.

Outside he fought it, the roar of dripping London in his ears. A cab drove up to the reception-canopy, and her father, Jerry Cardinegh, stepped out—incredibly shrunken, altered, and uncertain of step. Far different had he left London for India less than a year before, a hard, weathered, full-blooded man. Routledge hungered now for his friend of friends, but he did not call.

In the Rubicon Buffet, across the Square, the Review’s cheque was handed him presently by a messenger. The outcast signed the receipt, and sat down dazedly, forgetting to drink. An hour later, Burling-Forster entered the buffet with some friends from the Armory. The artilleryman saw Routledge at a far table and backed out.

“We will go on,” said he. “I perceive that this is no place for us.”

The manager’s quick eye had seen Burling-Forster’s glance rest upon the solitary figure at the distant table, and he stared doubtfully now at Routledge. The latter rose and approached him. “Forgive me,” he said, quitting the place. “Not for fortunes would I impair the popularity of your excellent buffet.”

London had changed in an hour; it was pitiless, alien. Yet he could laugh at London. The thought that made him writhe had to do with the gorgeous woman who had cast herself into the débris of his fortunes—the woman who had meant so much to him in the silences of service.... He moved about in the fog; passed the Review office, glanced up at the fourth floor, the blazing lights just a pale glimmer now. Friends were there, putting their best of brain and hand into the maw of the morning paper. The cutting sentences of Dartmore returned, and he did not go upstairs. In the little press-club around the corner, the day men were in festival. Routledge winced—and passed by. There was time still to catch a night-train for Paris, but he couldn’t let the mystery beat him, not even for the glisten of Paris—not for New Jerusalem! He would wait and ask no questions. A broad, low building very lavish with its music, lights, and laughter appeared at length upon the right of way. Routledge inquired of a policeman what was going on within.

“It’s the cab-drivers’ annual ’op, sir,” the officer said.

“May one enter who is not a cab-driver at present?” Routledge asked.

“’Avin’ the price, sir.”

All things to all men, Routledge fell gladly into the gathering, buying seas of beer and continents of cake. Within a half-hour he had telephoned to Rupley’s for a ten-story confection, and presently many couples, shining-faced, were preening and pirouetting for the possession of it. Had he been the King’s groom, he could not have mounted higher in the estimate of the guests. His heart grew warm with the fun. It was after midnight when the new social stratum tumbled about his ears. The hard-headed little master of ceremonies approached, very white and sorrowful:

“I regrets hexceedingly to say, sir, that one as ’as been dismissed from the Harmy’s and the Noivy’s ’op, sir, cawn’t rightly be expected to find a boith ’ere.”

Routledge had a large view of the world, and a compressed notion of the personal equation, but his humor did not save him now from being stung hard and deep.

“You are quite right, of course,” he said. “I’m very sorry to have intruded, and very thankful for the good time up to now. Good-night.”

There was a murmur of sorrow from many feminine quarters when the great frieze coat was brought, but it was quickly silenced by the undertone of intelligence which spread like poison through the hall. The butler at the Army and Navy reception had told one of the drivers, who, turning up later at the celebration of his own guild, found the outcast there. Thus have empires fallen.

Routledge walked the full distance to his lodgings. Sometimes he smiled; sometimes he found himself striding forward with mad swiftness; then he would smile again, and pull up to the pace of a leisurely gentleman enjoying the night air. Entering his stairway in Bookstalls, he just avoided stumbling over a little figure curled up asleep. His heart went out to the street-waif. Here was one, at least, in London who had no hate nor insult for him. The impulse came to carry the little one up into the warmth. Without waking, the child was placed in a big chair before the grate-fire in the lodgings upstairs. Then Routledge sat down to meditate.

“This is a merry old trail—God knows I love it!” he muttered. “I have had what the good gray poet would call a night of ‘richness and variety.’... Perhaps I would be less happy did I know the breed of incubus which has fallen upon me.... I shall probably be turned out of here in the morning—perhaps be cast into stone and steel. It is strange, strange, that I, Routledge, whose business it is to tell the world the gossip of inner courts and the issue of open fields—that the point of my own fate should be buried in me before I get a look at it!... And that wondrous girl! Why did I not know her when the dust of the world had not fallen upon me; when I had not looked upon the world’s red wines—because they were red!... Routledge, old wanderer, how often has some woman arisen to save you from death—and now a woman arises to save you from your friends!”

A watcher would have thought, for a long time afterward, that Routledge dozed, with the stem of a nargileh between his teeth, except for the soft bubbling in the bottle and the tiny puffs of smoke at long intervals. The dawn came in, graduated from gloomy gray to the dead-white of a sunless morning.... The bell aroused him. He arose and opened the door. Jerry Cardinegh was on the stairs.

SIXTH CHAPTER
A GRIM AND TERRIBLE TRADITION IS TOUCHED UPON FOR THE RELATION IT BEARS TO THE TREACHERY IN INDIA

Routledge stepped back from the open door. He was afraid to extend his hand, lest it be repelled. When the old man rushed across the landing and gripped him, he felt a rather novel kindling of gladness.

“God, son!” Cardinegh muttered, sinking into a chair. “I thought you had slipped London. This is the third time I’ve been here the last ten hours.”

“It must have been three this morning when I came in, Jerry, and I left about nine last night.”

“I was here between nine and ten, and again at midnight.”

“Then you didn’t stay long at the Armory? You don’t mean to say that the boys gave you an ovation—of my kind? Miss Noreen must have told you.”

“Routledge,” the other said slowly, struggling to get a tight rein upon a herd of flying faculties, “they welcomed me in the old way, but the place was disordered. You had been gone only a moment or two. Noreen was waiting for me in the ladies’ room—ready for the street. She would have gone home alone had I not arrived just then. Hurrying me away, she told me how you had been received. After that, she insisted upon coming here with me, though I told her I wanted to talk with you alone. Give me some whiskey.”

Routledge was startled by the shaking avidity with which Cardinegh carried the raw spirit to his lips.

“We came here direct from the Armory—Noreen and I,” he said breathlessly. “When we did not find you, we drove back to Cheer Street—and tossed the rest of the night. God pity her—I couldn’t tell her! Routledge, I didn’t dare to tell her!... She begged me to assure you again and again of her faith. She will see you to-day——”

There was a faint sigh and a soft squirming from the third chair before the fire. It had been turned away from the light. Cardinegh jumped to his feet with horror in his face.

“You’re nervous, old King-maker. Why, it’s just a little London waif I picked up asleep in my stairway.”

“Do you suppose he has heard what I’ve said?” the old man demanded huskily.

“You haven’t said anything yet that the world might not hear. Sit down and smoke, Jerry. God still reigns, and we’re Home.”

Cardinegh stared at the little figure curled up before the fire, catching his breath audibly.

“I’m all shot up,” he panted. “Say, but it’s like you, son, to pick up the little outcast.”

Routledge smiled, because the last word had a big and new meaning. “Perhaps our voices will bother him. I’ll put the lad in the next room,” he said, and untangled the knotted muddy laces, placing the wet, worn shoes evenly before the fire. As he lifted the boy in his arms, the eyes opened sleepily, but Routledge could not see the face pressed against his shoulder. They were drowsy, startled eyes, wise and very shiny, like those of a mouse. Routledge laid him upon his own bed and dropped a blanket over him. “Poor little gaffer, you smell like Bookstalls Road,” he muttered. “I could pick you out blind among the odors of India. Nothing short of a riot could keep you awake, but poor old Jerry will talk easier with you here—and the door shut.”

He drew his chair close to the other, and said genially: “And now, Jerry, tell me what is good for me to know.”

“Did you have a ghastly night, son,—your first night at Home in over a year?”

“I prefer to call it an interesting night.”

“You are about to rise with cumulative glory. Do you remember our last talk in the field—the bivouac at Bhurpal?”

Routledge nodded.

“And you suggested that the spies of the Russian Bear had worked down over the hills, and looted certain startling secrets having to do with British India?”

“It was only a suggestion. The facts are not clear to me yet. There was a colossal derangement somewhere—the same, I take it, that hurled England into alliance with Japan. I appear to be the only man in London who has been denied the truth.” Routledge reached for the amber-bit of his nargileh.

“They say a man is last to hear what is going on in his own house.”

“What is the parallel, Jerry?”

“I’ve got to come to that. All London does not know—except that you are under a cloud for treachery. Forty men in London know exactly what has happened in India. Perhaps ten of this forty were at the reception last night. The forty believe you to be the man who turned the monster trick in Afghanistan, well-called the Buffer State. They are the exalted heads of Departments—Foreign, Home, Colonial, War, and Secret-service chiefs—men who live in the shadow of the Throne. Six, at most, of the correspondents are in the secret. The rest can’t tell what you did, but to them, just the same, you are the ranking Iscariot.... Routledge, how many men know the truth about Shubar Khan’s Lotus Expedition?”

“Possibly the same forty men.”

“And the soldiers of Colonel Hammond’s regiment?”

“That is a historical mystery,” Routledge said. “Many are dead; the rest scattered and lost. The secret was miraculously preserved. Why, this is the masterpiece of England’s department of espionage.”

“The records of Colonel Hammond’s debauch in blood were stolen last autumn,” Cardinegh whispered. “The whole story was stolen—Hammond’s confession, the testimony of his court-martial, even to the disposal of the men of his regiment—the men who knew all!... God! what a story for Russia to put into the hands of the thrice ten thousand sons and sons’ sons of Shubar Khan in Afghanistan!”

Cardinegh laughed in an uncontrolled way.

“Routledge, my son,” he went on nervously, “when the Pathans and the Afridis turn to war, British India forgets her polo and her billiards and her forestry.... It all dates from the Kabul massacre—you remember, sixteen thousand white men and women and children killed. Colonel Hammond’s father and mother were among the dead. He was but a mite of a boy then, but it drove him mad when he became a man and was sent back to the same service as a colonel. You are one of the forty, Routledge. You know the story. The Khyber Hills and the same old trail where his parents were slain started a leak in Hammond’s skull. He was a good officer before that, or he wouldn’t have been a colonel. That leak grew into the torrent which washed away the mountain that fell upon Shubar Khan’s twenty-five hundred—men, women and children—down below in the valley——”

“That’s a nice figure of speech,” Routledge said soothingly. “But, Jerry, the facts, as I heard them were these: Colonel Hammond lost his mother and father on the same trail he was leading his troops over that night. That he had gone mad, everybody grants—from much brooding on the old Kabul massacre. He was out after Shubar Khan with his regiment, and just before dusk discerned the bivouac of the Pathans thousands of feet below in a valley. Shubar Khan had fifteen hundred soldiers, and a thousand women and children had joined their men in camp.

“Hammond’s original idea was to meet the Pathans in battle, but he happened to see this cliff hanging precariously over the steep slope. Now Hammond was a famed engineer. Mad as he was, he did not forget his craft. As for the women and children whom his scouts reported below—this only made the madman more keen. Remember, his mother had died just there.... He looked at the slope, and saw that if he could start the cliff, he could send an avalanche upon the crowded camp. It wasn’t fighting. England wouldn’t have done it, but we’re dealing with the insanity of a single leader. Hammond had dynamite. Also the Pathans didn’t know that the English regiment was above. The cliff was aimed at the camp. The blast worked. Falling rock dug a trench in the mountain, gaining tons of power every foot of slide. What happened has been kept secret by the British, but you and I know. Twenty-five hundred Pathans—including a thousand women and children—were buried alive. If Hammond had been able to keep his remnant of a brain, it would never have come out, but he was raving when he brought his outfit back to headquarters, and this started his men to thinking. A little thinking and they understood all. The towering atrocity, no one denies, but it was done by a madman—not by England, Jerry.”

“The Pathans thought it a natural landslide—until last autumn,” Cardinegh remarked, and there was exultation in his eyes.

A chill swept over Routledge for an instant, as if he had been in the presence of a human without a soul. The colossal havoc wrought decades ago by an insane Englishman was not a thing to be talked about as Cardinegh talked—his eyes gleaming with triumph. Even the Afghans had never learned the truth, so perfect was the British management. They looked upon the avalanche as a dreadful chastisement of the gods. They had gone back to scratch their rocky fields and raise their scrawny lambs with a growing belief that the gods wanted the English in their land, and that gods who could turn loose mysterious landslides knew best.

The ghosts of Shubar Khan’s twenty-five hundred—trooping through the monster hills on the darkest nights—they could not speak. The soldiers of the mad colonel—had they not all been divided, sent to fill the loneliest posts and the most hazardous fore-fronts, under the eyes of the secret-service men who see all and say nothing?... It was not England’s fault, this work of a crazed Englishman who undertook to avenge the massacre of the sixteen thousand. It was a thing to be hidden deep in the hearts of a few—this grim and terrible history.

To have Russia get it now—the indisputable documents—would enable her to start Afghanistan boiling again. The Border States and all India would be embroiled. More than all, the British troops serving in India would be lashed into mutiny by the story of what happened to the men of Colonel Hammond’s regiment—the men who knew all. Yes, Russia could build her great war upon it—the long-prophesied war—and drive her puppets against England for the possession of northern India.

Routledge was filled with shuddering by these thoughts of war, and by the man before him, laughing softly, insanely, and drinking raw whiskey—another Colonel Hammond in the flesh!

“Let me get this straight, Jerry,” he said lightly. “One man steals the documents which tell the whole truth about Shubar Khan, and puts the story in the hands of the Russians——”

“And at what a time!” Cardinegh exclaimed passionately. “When did Abduraman die?”

“Last October. He was a valuable man for the British,” Routledge added thoughtfully. “He held the Pathans and the Afridis from fighting the English, and at the same time managed to avoid angering Russia. He was the man for the Buffer State.”

“His sons are not so valuable.” Cardinegh chuckled. “Abduraman died of a stroke, as the newspapers said. It was a stroke!... When was Cantrell, the British Agent in Kabul, murdered?”

“A month later.”

“When were we all called in from the field and Bhurpal forgotten?”

“A month later still.”

“What a God-given time it was!” the old man exclaimed.

Routledge saw the need of holding Cardinegh together until he could get the whole story. “I can see clearly how one man might use these documents to start war in Afghanistan,” he capitulated; “how Russia could spread the hell all along the border, supplying powder and guns, and getting a formidable enemy launched against England, before taking the field herself. I can even see how all India, ‘seething with hatred for her white child, the British foundling’—I always liked that sentence—might arise and say, ‘This is the accepted time.’ More than that, I can see how the story of Colonel Hammond’s lost regiment might start a contagion of mutiny patches over the British army——”

“Some work for one man.”

“Big work, Jerry,” Routledge agreed. “I can see it all so far, but you will have to pardon me for having a little interest left in the fact, that I was practically ejected from the Armory last night.”

The old man fell silent and his fears whipped him again. “Don’t murder me until I am through, son. You are supposed to be the man who gave the story to the Russian spies.”

“Ah!” said Routledge. “I am supposed to be the man, and yet no one consulted me upon the matter. If I were merely supposed to be the man—would I have been turned out?”

“The forty who know the story—have no doubt about you.”

Here a great light was thrown upon the recent activity of the White Mustache. “Why am I not arrested, Jerry?”

“The Government does not dare.”

“Publicity?”

“Exactly. The truth about Afghanistan to-day is a secret guarded with men’s lives. Arbitration is afire between here and Petersburg. If India and Russia saw the British people aroused, the chances are that they would be forced to strike at once. Soldiers are being rushed secretly toward Khyber Pass. Troop-ships are embarking suddenly and without ostentation from England this moment. To make this story public—and this would be in danger by your arrest—would start the Indian sympathizers around the world. The mere name of Shubar Khan brings old England to her knees. This has been a pregnant day in the Inner Circle, my son. No, you will not be arrested.”

“Why am I not murdered quietly?”

“The same reason, with another. I attended to that. Every one who knows this story of Shubar Khan must be reckoned with. I told them that you must be kept alive—that I could secure your written confession. They believe that I am at it now.”

Routledge was throwing the whole strength of his concentrated faculties into the eyes of the old man. Cardinegh’s face was like death.

“Where did you meet the secret agents?”

“At Naples. They had me on the carpet almost before I left ship.”

“This is the most absorbing tale I have ever encountered, Jerry. I am to give you a written confession of how I fell in with the Russians and gave them the documents concerning Shubar Khan, which I had stolen. Why did you choose me to make this confession—because I am your best friend?”

“Yes,” Cardinegh answered hoarsely; “because you are my best friend. Not another man in the world would have carried the burden for me. They would never have let me reach London.”

Routledge bent forward and spoke with lowered voice: “Then it was you who fell in with the Russians——”

“Yes.”

Routledge couldn’t help it—the presence of the other put a poisoned look into his face for an instant. The last fifteen minutes he had endured every phase of astonishment and horror. The revelation shook the psychic roots of his being.

“For the love of God, son—don’t look at me that way! Wait till I have told you all. I thought you were already in London—with Noreen. I was in Italy, and they never would have let me reach here. I never could have seen her—or Cheer Street again.”

Pity came to Routledge. He looked down upon the wreck of Jerry Cardinegh. He caught up his own nerve-ends and bound them together, smiled, and placed his hand upon the old man’s knee.

“How often I have found it,” he said musingly, “that a day like yesterday portends great events. I had the queerest sort of a day yesterday, Jerry. Hour after hour I sat here, neglecting things which needed doing, thinking, thinking. I have found it so before in my life—days like yesterday preceding a crisis.... Weren’t any of the other boys suspected, or any of the soldiers? Why was it that the finger of the episode pointed to you or me?”

“Since October the whole occult force of the Empire has been upon the case,” Cardinegh answered. “It was a civilian job on the face of it. That was incontrovertible. All the other boys fell under the eyes of the service. They didn’t know it, of course, but each day of the past four months we have been covered, our pasts balanced. One after another, the process of elimination vindicated them—all but you and me. Your infernal habit of campaigning alone was against you, your being an American, your Brahmin affiliations, your uncanny knowledge of the Great Inside. Still, they took nothing for granted. At Naples two agents drew me to cover, demanding what I knew. It was you or I. They knew it, and I knew it. The bulk of suspicion leaned your way. I shaped more evidence against you, hinted that I could secure your confession, if they only let me alone until I could get to you.”

“Tell me again just why, Jerry.”

“Because I wanted a day—just one day! I hadn’t seen Noreen for nearly a year. I wanted a day with her. I needed to arrange her affairs. God help me, Routledge, I wanted her to love the old man—one more day! I couldn’t cable you. I thought—I thought you would hold the weight one day—for old sake’s sake!”

“And what do you propose to do, Jerry?”

“I have had my day. I am going to the War Department with the facts this morning!”

“And then?”

“Vanish.”

“And your daughter—Miss Noreen?”

Cardinegh swallowed with difficulty. His unsteady fingers fumbled at the place where a man in the field carries a bit of ordnance. The ghost of a smile shook itself out on his face.

“Don’t think I am sorry,” he said. “I joggled the seats of the mighty. It was a life’s work. I’ve got my joy for it. It’s not what I expected—but it’s done. I can’t see the good of it clear as I did—but it’s done. Only I wanted to look it in the face like the old Jerry Cardinegh might have done—not sick, shaking, and half-drunk. I should have done it when the little house in Cheer Street only meant to me a sweet resting-place between wars. I burned out before the end, my son.”

“But Noreen——”

“In the name of God, don’t drive that home again! She’ll never know what the forty know. She’s provided for. I have had my day—thanks to you. They’ll let me clear from England. I’m accustomed to take short-notice trips, and to stay long. She will hear—as she always feared some time to hear—oh, typhoid in Madagascar, a junk murder up the Yangtse—potted somewhere!... Blessed little Noreen. In tears she told me what had happened to you at the Armory. Think how I felt, son. She loves you, Routledge. What—what I’ve done doesn’t affect her value—in your eyes?”

“Jerry, how did you get away with this thing in India?”

“Nobody knows but me. I suppose I’d better tell you. Before my last short trip home, there was a rumor of fighting in Afghanistan. You remember, eight or nine British correspondents gathered there, including you and me. Cantrell and I were rather close; and old Abduraman, I think, trusted me more than any of the others, on account of my age and service. He was an insatiable listener, and a perfect, an improved, double-action pump. I think it was one of the elements of his greatness—the wily old diplomat.

“Any way, I was closeted with him many times. You would come in at night after studying the strategic points of that devil’s land; no doubt, from Kabul to the Pass. For once in my life, I was content with office work. I mean Abduraman’s court and his thoughts. Then, too, I was much with Cantrell, who was a sort of secret-service chief in that district, as you well understand. From time to time the different agents would come in for a night—the men who do the dirty work for England.”

Cardinegh’s eyes blazed again. With a few admirable sentences, Routledge steadied him and regained the continuity....

“It was a still night, hot as hell,” Cardinegh went on. “Kabul can be hot when the winds die down from the mountains—but you were there that night. You know. I was in Cantrell’s house. Three of the Nameless who serve England with their lives, and are satisfied with a cipher message or a whispered word of praise from some head of department——”

“I’ve studied the secret service, Jerry,” Routledge ventured mildly. “It is interesting, but I’m more interested to know what happened.”

“We all proceeded to relax. The devil in me would not be burned by the fieriest wines. Remember, Cantrell was a weak man, but sincere. The other three had been studying Afghanistan against towering odds. They knew more about the inner life of the Buffer State than any three white men, not excepting Cantrell and yourself, between Persia and British India. They were sure of Cantrell. As for old Jerry Cardinegh—why, they took me for granted.

“Presently—it was very late—everybody but old Jerry had the bars down and soaked. Then I ventured to open the question of Colonel Hammond. It was an old story to Cantrell and to the three—not a new story to me, but a strange one. I was fascinated by the inside talk. Here were men who had kept the secret for years; the men—at least, two of them—who had helped to scatter the British troops of Colonel Hammond.

“Suddenly Cantrell arose and staggered to his safe, glancing at the shut door and the open windows of the office. He fumbled with the knob for a long time before the big door swung open. Then with small keys which he found inside he got into the inner compartment and drew forth a fat envelope.

“‘Speaking of Colonel Hammond,’ Cantrell said, with a drunken smile, ‘I’ve got the whole documents here. They were never trusted to the mails, but they trusted me. I’ve never brought them out before—but we have fallen into the arms of our friends. Isn’t it so?’

“We all acquiesced, and then there was interesting reading. Routledge, it was the great story I had been looking for—all that I wanted to know about one of the most damnable military expeditions ever transacted. I said to myself the world ought to know about this. That was because I was a newspaper man. Then I said again, ‘The world ought to know about this,’ and that was the humanitarian end. I was thinking of Ireland and India.

“Two of the secret-service men were asleep finally. Cantrell moved about and served on legs of hot wax.

“‘I’m glad you put that back in the safe, Cantrell,’ I said, when the envelope was safely in my pocket. ‘You could do a lot of damage to England with that just now.’

“I glanced at the secret agent who was awake, and found that he was not in on my steal. I should have made a joke of it, if he had been. The fact is, I did not really have the idea of stealing the papers until I found that I had done it.... Cantrell locked the safe, and the world was mine—all in a coat pocket!... You mind, when Cantrell was killed, or assassinated, the safe was blown open—quite a while afterward? I had been back to England and to Ireland with Noreen in the meantime.

“God, how I have whipped the English!... When your name was spoken last night at the Armory, the faces about me were like a lot of blood-mad dogs—nostrils dilated and hackles up. I had to love you, Routledge, to turn loose upon you—the Hate of London!”

“And you had the Hammond papers all the time you were in England and Ireland?” Routledge inquired.

“Of course. I had only a few weeks in Europe before I was called back to the Bhurpal skirmish-stuff. You had stayed in India——”

“But when and where did you get the papers to the Russian spies, Jerry?”

“In Bhurpal—as that affair opened. It was weeks before I met you that night of the gathering when the two British forces came together. I stopped at the Rest House in Sarjilid, on the way by train from Calcutta to the front. It was there I heard a Russian sentence from an alleged Parsee. I was onto the spy in a moment, but first I want to tell you why I turned over the papers to him. First, rather, I want a drink of whiskey. I’m talking thick and fast, and it burns out the energy.”

Routledge served him. “Why you gave Cantrell’s papers to the first Russian spy you met in India is what I want to know,” he said carelessly.

“Listen, then. The idea came to me before I went out to India on that Bhurpalese mix-up. I told you that Noreen and I took a little trip to Ireland. I shouldn’t have gone back to Tyrone—where her mother bloomed—where I was a boy. I shouldn’t have gone back!”

The old man’s voice trembled, but he did not lose his point.

“As it was, my son, the thoughts of Noreen’s mother and Ireland were burning too deep in memory.... But we went back. The sun was going down on the little town. It was dirty, shrunken, decayed—that old stone city—and the blithest place a youth ever met a maiden, or passed his boyhood.... Ah, the mothers and youths and maidens and the memories of old Tyrone always sung in my heart—when I could forget England!”

Routledge lit a cigarette over the lamp and handed it to Cardinegh without speaking. Jerry did not continue for a moment. Then followed the impression his birthplace made upon him—the veteran with his daughter:

“I can’t forget our last look—the old town, shrunken and silent in the midst of her quarries. I heard the muttering in the doorways, as we have heard it in India. The best blood had gone to America; the knitting-works were shut down—the remnant starving. It was like India in plague and famine, but I could have borne that.... It was the next morning when I saw the British garrison quartered upon the town——”

“You know how Colonel Hammond felt when something sprung a leak in his brain,” Routledge suggested.

“You’ve hit it, boy.... There was the old town, starving at best, with three hundred British soldiers devouring its substance! It made me think of a fallen camel—with a red-necked vulture for every bone in the carcass. And that’s Ireland and that’s India!”

The whiskey was bright in the old man’s eyes. “Look out, Routledge, when you hear a snap in your brain! You said something to that effect.... I went back to India, as you know, up from Calcutta to Sarjilid, where I met the Russo-Parsee. I thought of Noreen and her mother, and Tyrone, and the service of England, which I know as well as you. I thought of India.

“What did I find in Sarjilid? There was a famine there, too, and a garrison of red-necked vultures; sand blowing down from the windy hills; stench from the huts; voices from the doorways; a salt-tax that augmented the famine because the people needed but could not buy their own product; naked brown children, fleshless as empty snake-skins—but I won’t go on! I must go to the war-office presently.... It was at Sarjilid that I met the Russian.... It may be that I am another Colonel Hammond, but I gave the documents away. He was an enchanting chap—that Russian!”

Cardinegh here whispered the details of his treachery. The politics of the world would not be cleaned by the dialogue, but the big fact remains that the documents concerning Colonel Hammond’s dynamite went into Russian hands—a fire-brand for her to ignite Afghanistan, the Indian Border, and British mutinies.

“Then I went back into the field to watch. Weeks passed,” he continued hastily. “We met in Bhurpal, and you told me what you had discovered. I knew. Each day was a brimming beaker of joy to me then. I saw British India shudder at the broken vessel of her secrets.

“Routledge, it was as if you struck a viper in the spine. British India curled up. I had struck her in the spine. She writhed and curled up!”

Cardinegh laughed again. “Ireland will be rid of British garrisons. They will travel oversea to fight the Afghans and the Russians now. The red-necks at Sarjilid won’t have to travel so far! There’ll be a fifty-mile battle-front, as you said—you ‘amateur prophet’! You and the other boys will campaign—but old Jerry won’t be there. I’ve had my day—and this is another one. I’m off to lift your load, my son.”

The veteran campaigner arose and donned his coat. Routledge was pacing up and down the room. Cardinegh reached the door, and, holding to the knob, spoke again:

“I know what you think, my son. You think that my plan miscarried. You think that England spoiled my work—that her treaty with Japan was my answer. You think that England will rub away the rest of the insulation between Russia and Japan, and that the Bear will fuse into the Rising-Sun—that all this will pull Russia up from the border of British India. Ah! ... and you think well. I can’t see it all as clear as I did once. I can’t feel the thought of failure as I did once. England has time to strengthen her borders and cover her nakedness if Russia and Japan fight—but the story of Shubar Khan is told and my work done! It’s the initial lesion, Routledge, and the veins of British India are running with the toxin of a disease—sometimes amenable to heroic treatment—like the Anglo-Japanese Alliance—but always incurable!”

SEVENTH CHAPTER
ROUTLEDGE BEGS FOR A STIMULANT—THE STUFF THAT SINGS IN THE VEINS OF KINGS

Rain upon the windows. The atmosphere was heavy in the lodging, heavy from a sleepless night. Tobacco ash upon the floor; white embers in the grate; the finer ash of burned emotions in the eyes of the men. Neither had spoken for several moments.... Whose was to be the desolation of war? Was North China or China South soon to rumble with the tramp of foreign armies? Routledge put the question away among the far concerns of his mind. It was a moment now to mourn the man before him. There never had been an instant of hate for Jerry Cardinegh—perhaps, a full sweep of horror, at first, but that was gone, and in its wake was a pity of permanence.

He mourned his friend who was mad, dead. The years had wrought a ghastly trick here. Under many constellations, he had heard Cardinegh whisper his passionate hatred for England and her relation to Ireland and to India. Not a little of it Routledge himself shared. He perceived now that this passion had devoured the reason and sweetness of the old man’s mind. The Cardinegh of old days looked no longer out of these hunted, red-lit eyes. A pestilence had deranged the well-loved face. It was evil now in the fire-light—like a tampered chart. A life of brooding had vanquished the excellent humor at the last. Oppression had nursed a demon to obsess the brain and make a shudder of a good name.

“I must go,” Cardinegh said roughly. “It is my last day. This morning my final arrangements for Noreen. An hour with her—then to the war-office with the revelation. You’ll stay here, son. Stick to these walls—until Dartmore and the boys bring your glory back to you.... I can see them trooping in!... And Noreen—ah, the gladness of her!”

Routledge opened wide the windows and stood by while the morning swept in, damp, chill, but cleansing.

“Sit down a moment more, Jerry,” he said finally. “I want to ask a favor of you. It is a hard thing, a delicate thing—harder and more delicate than the thing you trusted to me, without asking. There is no other white man whom I would dare ask such a favor.”

“Out with it, son.” Cardinegh watched him wonderingly. Routledge sat down and leaned forward, a fine light in his big, calm eyes.

“I told you I had passed an interesting night, Jerry. It was more than that—a wonderful night. Thoughts have come to me that never squirmed in mortal brain before. I felt this vast moil of London—my enemy! I felt it gathering about my ears like the Tai Fung in the China sea. It was rich, incomparably rich, the stimulus of a Cæsar—this Herod-hate of seven million souls! I’ve been thinking for hours, Jerry—and I should have been writing—stuff for glory—the great book! Whiskey wouldn’t bring out such work, nor drugs, nor Yogi asceticism. I have glimpsed such work in stars, in battle-smoke, in bivouac fires, in the calm and distances of the monster Himalayas; perhaps in the eyes of women—but glimpses only, Jerry! To-night it came like a steady stream of empyrean fire. I want months of it—months! I would pay half my life to have London and the army hating me this way until the work is done. It’s the stuff that sings in the veins of kings. Give it to me—for the book!”

“Wake up! You fool—wake up!”

“Listen, old champion,” Routledge went on passionately: “I have spent this life gathering the data of experience. I have crossed the Sahara in the hue and garb of a camel driver; I have lain months a yellow Mohammedan in the huts of Lahore; as a Sannyasi, I have trudged up to the roof of the world. And the fighting, Jerry—Pathan, Zulu, and Burmese; and the revolts—Afghan, Balkan, Manipur, African, Philippine—all these came back, vivid, splendid last night—pictures fit to gild and garnish the Romance of the Open. And, Jerry, I have peered into the mystic lore of India, the World’s Mother—subtly and enticingly to color it all! I want to do this, Jerry, the Book of our Tribe! I shall write it in blood, with pillars of fire leaping up for chapter-heads—if you will only leave this flood of power in my veins—the Hate of London!”

Cardinegh, gasping, clutched his hand. “One of us—you or I—is mad——”

“Mad, of course,” laughed Routledge. “A man must be a little mad with the inspiration of Keats and the punch of Carlyle banging together in his brain.”

Hope lived wildly now in Cardinegh’s eyes. “And while you are doing the book,” he muttered, “I am to live out your tinsel and truffles here, play the grizzled warrior—led about by the child of her mother.... Routledge—Routledge, your brand of stimulus is new and raw.”

“I’m tolerated to ordinary poisons, Jerry. A man immersed in gentle azure can’t get the other pigments out of his brain.”

Cardinegh arose. “It’s sweet heaven to me,” he murmured strangely, with quivering lips. “It is a rest such as I have never known. I never was ready to rest until now, until to-day—when I thought the chance was burned away. You want to take this?”

“Yes.”

“Months of life—Home, Noreen!... Damme, Routledge—I’m broken! It’s like you, Routledge—it’s like you——”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kin I come out now, Mister?”

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

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

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

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

“What’s your name, little soul?”

“Johnny Brodie.”

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

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

“Have you slept there often, Johnny?”

“Not wery,” the boy said nervously.

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

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

“Allus.”

“But haven’t you any place to sleep?”

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

Routledge regarded him with joy.

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

Routledge nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

“Lor’! Say, Mister, honest?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For many seconds neither spoke; then it was Noreen.

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

“I cannot tell—even you.”

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

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

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

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

“Not with dishonor!”

He was silent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And the natives have no money?”

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

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

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

“She does not feed her children.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But why don’t the Hindus emigrate?”

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

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

“India has no arms.”

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

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

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

Mr. Jasper laughed a little nervously.

“It was India that whipped Napoleon.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Jasper offered his card.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Such a war as never has been——”

“In Asia?”

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

“Just once more?”

“Yes.”

“Did he tell you where?”

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

“In the Leper Valley,” he said.

“Must you still go to the Leper Valley?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Madan Das was a worthy man——”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know nothin’ about ’im.”

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

“Till dark.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her father regarded her hungrily as she entered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manifestly this would never do. Noreen felt uncomfortable in her probing. She must make him see how important anything he might say would be not only to her, but to the Man.... As for what the boy knew, an analyst, or, better, an alienist, would be necessary to piece into a garment of reason his poor little patches of understanding, in regard to what he had heard that night—names of men and places and deeds outside of Bookstalls. The fact that Johnny Brodie did not understand, was no reason why he should uncover his patches to this woman who understood so much. He was a little afraid of her, and not a little sorry that he had come. He felt, in spite of himself, that his face was telling her that he knew a great deal about that night. He squirmed.

Noreen sensed many of his mental operations, arose and knelt before him, her elbows upon his knees, and looked up into his face.

“Boy,” she whispered, “you are very good and dear to me for trying to keep his secrets. He is a great and good man, who means very much to you and to me. He is doing for some one else (who cannot love him as you and I do) a great thing and a hard thing, which keeps him away from us. So long as the secret is kept, Boy, he will have to stay away, but if we knew the secret we could bring him back to us and be very happy.... I want you to tell me all that you know, all that you heard that night while the visitor was there—but before you do you must understand that you are doing only good for him. His good, his welfare, is life and death to me. I love this man, Johnny Brodie, I think even better than you do. Won’t you help me to bring him back?”

His eyes were wide with temptation. He longed to consult her about the laughing stranger who had pumped him. Many things had happened to him in twelve flying, graceless years, but nothing like this. Never would come another moment like this—with the woman, whom Bookstalls had gasped at the sight of, kneeling before him. The fate of a city might well have wavered in the balance before the pleading of such a woman. He had a premonitive sense that this moment would become more significant the older he grew. She overturned half his resistance with the single fact of sharing with him the possession of the Man and acknowledging his almost co-equal rights in all that pertained. It was not her interest, but their interest.... And then—the seething curiosity for months—this woman could tell him why the Man wanted the Hate of London! There could be no mistake about this last. The Man had begged for it in many ways and in such language as was never heard in Bookstalls, except in the Socialist’s Hall. How could one old man, all scarred and shot up, give him the Hate of London?

At this instant Jerry Cardinegh opened the door from the dining-room. Noreen felt the little body turn rigid under her hands and saw the thin jaw tighten. As she turned hastily to her father, she heard Johnny Brodie’s voice—the voice of one who has triumphed over temptation:

“Ask ’im! Wot yer askin’ me fer—wen ’e knows?”

She hurried to lead her father back into the dining-room, but he could not stir. His eyes had fixed themselves upon the boy, and seemed to be draining from him some deadly poison. His liquor betrayed him, as it ever betrays the old and the fallen. The tissue it had sustained collapsed in his veins and the low light left his brain. Only there remained horror as of a basilisk upon his face. His bright, staring eyes had a look of isolation in the midst of altered ashen features.

It was too much for Johnny Brodie—this quick formation of havoc on the face that had been florid and smiling. Moreover, he saw the conspiracy against him in the woman and the old man. He clapped his hand to his pocket—the cap was where it belonged—bolted into the hall and down the stairs.

Noreen’s lips formed to call his name, but the look of her father forbade. She heard the slam of the front door.

THIRTEENTH CHAPTER
JERRY CARDINEGH OFFERS A TOAST TO THE OUTCAST—A TOAST HE IS COMPELLED TO DRINK ALONE

There was but one face in the world—the face of the boy who had so startled Jerry Cardinegh in Routledge’s rooms their last night together—that could have brought to the old man as now the falsity of his position, the shame of his silence, and the horrid closing of his life. Routledge himself could not have done this, for he would have returned with a smile and a grip of the hand. Cardinegh had received in full voltage the galvanism Routledge had craved as a boon. He tried to speak, but the sound in his throat was like dice shaking in a leather box. He tried again unavailingly, and sank into a chair. Noreen brought the whiskey.

“Why, father, it was just a little boy whom Routledge-san knew,” she soothed. “I found him on the street to-day, and asked him to come to see us to-night—because he had known Routledge-san.”

For an hour he sat quietly, and neither spoke.

The bell rang. Noreen steeled herself to meet a party of correspondents who had promised to drop in upon Jerry that night. The old king was not forgotten by the princes of the craft, and his daughter was unforgettable.

“Are you well enough to see the boys, father?”

In the past hour the old man had felt the fear of his daughter’s presence, a deadly fear of questions. A sort of hopeless idea came to him—that men in the room would be a defense—until he was himself again.

“Of course. Bring them in.... The little chap—— ... I was gripped of a sudden.... It’s an old dog at best, I am, deere!”

Finacune, as handsome as a young rose-vine in his evening wear; the heavy, panting Trollope, who put on weight prodigiously between wars; Feeney, with his look of gloom, as if a doom-song were forever chanting in his brain; and young Benton Day, of slight but very promising service, the man who was to take Routledge’s place on the Review in the event of war—these filled the Cheer Street sitting-room with brisk affairs. Noreen’s heart was in the dark with the little boy fleeing back to Bookstalls through the noisy October night. Old Jerry was shaken up and embraced. There was to be a full gathering of war-scribes at Tetley’s later, to discuss the Russian reply to certain Japanese proposals received by cable in the afternoon. The dean was invited to preside. Noreen saw the pained look in the eyes of Finacune as he relaxed her father’s hand.

“I’ll not go,” said Jerry. “I drink enough at home, sure. Did you say Russia has been talking back—though it’s little interest I have in rumors of war? It’s a boy’s work.”

“The Czar says Japan may run Korea, but as for Manchuria it is, ‘Hands off, Brownie.’” said Finacune.

“Which means——” Trollope began.

“The same old tie-up,” added Finacune. “Only closer to the cutting. Cable to the Pan-Anglo this afternoon declares that Japan has already granted the inevitability of war.”

“Russia suggests,” Benton Day observed carefully, “that Japan offer no military demonstration in Korea from the Yalu down to 40°. Japan says in reply that she must have a similar zone of gunless activity, then, north of the Yalu.”

“And the fact is,” said Feeney, “they’ll be shooting at each other from bank to bank before the ice is out in the spring.”

“It’s a theory of mine,” Trollope offered, “that Japan will sink a Russian battleship or blow up a Russian troop-train, and then observe playfully that further negotiations are uncalled-for.”

Jerry was staring at the carpet, apparently in deep thought. Noreen was close to Finacune.

“Don’t ask him again to go to Tetley’s with you to-night,” she whispered. “He is far from well.”

“I thought it would cheer him up—to preside over an old-fashioned session of prayer for action.”

She shook her head. Her father now stared about from face to face and finally fixed upon her the nervous smile.

“There’s a deere,” he said, “run and see if the dinner things are cleared away. We must get about the board—for a toast to the work ahead.... Come, boys, to the dining-room.”

They obeyed with enthusiasm. Glasses and things were brought by Noreen. Jerry sat rigid at the head, perspiration upon his brow, the struggle for light to think by in his brain. The men felt the strain, and pitied the woman.

“And what does England do in all this?” Cardinegh asked huskily, after a painful pause.

Old Feeney was nearest the dean. He dropped his hand upon the other’s arm in a quiet way. “England boosts for Japan, Jerry,” he replied. All were eager to relieve the strain by a detailed discussion on any subject, but the dean renewed:

“And is all quiet in India?”

“Quiet as the ‘orchard lands of long ago,’” said Finacune.

There was something in the old man’s voice which suggested to Noreen the long forgotten passion—so out of place here. She trembled lest he should prove unable to handle himself.

“England——” Cardinegh rumbled the name. It was as if he were fighting for a grasp upon all that the gigantic word had meant to him. “England ought to be down there fighting the Czar on the British-Indian border—not on the Yalu.”

It was clear to all why England was not embroiled with Russia—the Anglo-Japanese alliance—save to the old man who should have known best. The truth thundered now in the clouds of his brain, but he could not interpret. Nobody spoke, for the dean’s hand was raised to hold the attention. The gesture was a pitiful attempt to assist him to concentrate. He faltered helplessly, and finally uttered the words nearest his lips:

“Finacune, the florid,—you’re for the Word as usual?”

They all breathed again. The old man had found a lead.

“Always for the Word, Jerry—I write war for the skirt-departments of London.”

“And you, Blue Boar—for the Examiner?” he demanded of Trollope.

“The same.”

“And Benton Day—you——” Cardinegh’s expression suddenly became single-pointed. Here were breakers again.

“It’s not rightly settled, sir. I’ve got lines out severally. I really do want to go.”

“Then Dartmore didn’t call you to the Review yet?”

“I did speak with Dartmore,” said Day. “Things are not altogether settled, though.”

Jerry regarded him for a second, as if to say, “I’ll get back to you, young man, when I am through with this peroration.”

“And, Bingley, the ‘Horse-killer’?” he resumed.

“Goes out for the Thames, as usual. There’s a lad that means to make us all sweat,” Finacune said thoughtfully.

“Feeney—you old were-wolf—you’ve been scratching old Mother Earth in the raw places—almost as long as I have. What are you out for this time?”

Feeney hesitated, and Trollope dragged out the answer: “All kinds of berths for Feeney. The Thames will put out a dispatch-boat which he can command if he likes. The Pan-Anglo wants him for the Russian end. Also he’s got an offer to follow the Japanese. Feeney told me more about the Yalu country, and that new cartridge-belt of creation, while we were walking over here to-night—red-beard bandits, Russian grand dukes, Japanese spies, with queues, who have been mapping Manchuria for ten years—than any white man has a right to know.”

The fact was that old Feeney had about closed to go out for the Witness, which Jerry had left open.

“There’s no need of asking about Talliaferro,” Cardinegh said impatiently.

“No, Talliaferro is Peter Pellen’s ‘Excalibur,’ as usual; and will set out on schedule for the Yalu or the Gugger—wherever the fronts meet.”

“And the Witness?” Jerry said, clearing his throat. His thoughts were like birds starting up in the dusk, clots of night without name and form.

Finacune arose and filled the breech. “The Witness awaits the word of the greatest of us all—our dean, Jerry Cardinegh. I propose now a drink to him standing—to the greatest of our kind!”

Personal vanity had never fallen into the senility of the Irishman, but he arose with the others, and his face caught up an old wild look familiar to everyone in the room, as he raised his hand to speak:

“Let us drink to the greatest of us all, as you say,—not to the decayed correspondent which the Witness does not wait for.” His eyes flashed with a sudden memory of the windy night in Bhurpal. “Let us drink to the greatest of us all—‘the man whom the gods formed for a war-correspondent—or a spy, as you like—whom they tempered in hell’s fire and holy water’—drink to Cosmo Routledge, already afield!”

The old man did not note the suppressed disorder, nor the dawn of joy on the face of his daughter.

“I remember he called me the ‘damaged archangel’ that night,” he added softly, and turned to Benton Day: “God be with him this night—and with you, too, lad—for you’ll need Him—to take his place.”

Jerry drank ceremoniously and alone, but there was a fuller tribute than any emptied glass ever tokened—in the brimming eyes of Noreen.... The boys were in the hall.

“I’m going—not to war, lads—but to bed,” Cardinegh said, and presently called after them at the door: “May the patchwork for peace fail to cover the knees of the nations!”

Noreen was alone. Her brain, sensitive from weariness and wounds, moved swiftly, restlessly. She knew at this moment the correspondents would be discussing the phases of her father’s madness—whispering at Tetley’s of the fall of the chieftain. Later, at the banquet-table, when the wines swept away all lesser regards, they would no longer whisper.... These men were her friends all. Not one would have hesitated to serve her well in any need. She did not want to do them an injustice; and yet there was something in their minds that was stinging and foreign now. The cause was in her own mind, and she realized it. They were big among men, big among their kind, honorable and genuine, but it was not in human reason for them to share her immutable trust, any more than they could share the feminine outpouring of her heart for the man afield. Also she knew that there were few things in this world that Routledge could have done wicked enough to shake these men so utterly from allegiance to him. He had been to them a mystical attraction of virtue, as he was now in their eyes the imperator among criminals.

She understood something of what her father had passed through in the recent hours. The sight of the Bookstalls boy had withered him like some disordered ghost; and yet, to her, there was a greater tragedy in watching her father try to hold his old place as chief at the table of war-men. He had not lost that king-torture of consciousness which showed him that he was not as he had been. His struggle to cast out the abiding fatuities, and to regain his old high place of mental activity, was terrible to witness—like the suspension of his faculties upon a cross.

Little could be added now to Noreen’s suffering. It is not given to one in the depths to realize what perfect soul-substance the recent months had brought her. The thought had come in her happier reactions, that if she were like other human beings, the patience, the self-control, and the purity of her yearning—this bearing all cleanly and without a cry—was great with tempering and expansion. But the hunger within her was deep and masterful for the end of it all. As never before, she felt the need of a human force to lean upon. There was neither priest nor pastor nor woman in her life. Her heart cried out for a greatness such as Routledge had suggested in Rawder. To her, their bravest man was a splendid, glowing picture of sorrows; before such a one she could have knelt and found healing, indeed.... And with what infinite content could she have knelt in this hour before the disciple of Rawder!

It is a dear but delicate thing to chronicle that matters of sex were practically untouched by the mind of the woman in so far as Routledge was concerned. Not at all did she despise these matters; nor is it to be inferred that she was one of those miraculous innocents who reach maturity with a mind virgin to the mysteries of creation. She had felt with a thrilling, exquisite sense the imperious young summer of her life, and all that throbbing veins and swift-running dreams mean under the steady stars.... But the call to her out of all creation—which was the voice of Routledge—was vital with a rounder and more wonderful vibrance.

One art of his that had found the heart of her was his conception of the inner loveliness of life. He caught the finer relation of things. He could love the lowliest, hunger with them, and realize in their midst the brotherhood of man. He perceived the great truths everywhere which purely physical men, of necessity, must miss. His discovery of Rawder was great with meaning to Noreen, and his adoration for those silent sacrifices which summed into a life of glory unobserved by the world. He could love India without hating England. He could be the greatest of war-scribes and despise war. He laughed at material possessions and bowed before breech-clout chivalry. He had witnessed processes of life and death in their most cruel, intricate, and abominable manifestations, but had preserved his optimism. This, which so many words are required even to suggest—and which is covered in the single expression, soul growth—was the rousing, irresistible appeal of Routledge to the woman whose spiritual age was sufficient to respond to it.

The man’s intellect—in contrast to the enchanting mystic element of his mind—compelled, stimulated, and enfolded her own. When Routledge talked, such a sympathy was aroused within her that she could watch the play of scenes before his eyes, the tithe of which only he told. In all that he had said and written she found the same smooth-running, high-powered intelligence. She had never touched his limitations, therefore infinity could hold no greater delights. She loved the harmony of his talents and the sterling, one-pointed direction of a man whose life is apart from the complicated lives of modern men. All dimensions of knowledge were in his mind; and yet its surfaces were free from taints and scar-tissue, preserved with virginities. His thoughts had that firm delicacy of the strong, and some of his thoughts had ripened in mystic suns and rains.

Once she had been but one of many champions of the man and his work. From time to time under his name, the Review had ignited London. The men of his world and hers had granted his supremacy as a picture-maker of war—and yet to her this was one of his lesser attractions. She loved to look into his conception of things back of the words. How pitiably often were the words shaped to meet the so-called needs of a daily paper, as the bones of a Chinese foot are crushed into a thimble. It was the master behind the narrator; the man who lived and moved in a wonderland that was a hopeless arcanum to the many; the man who glimpsed the temple of truth, if not from within, at least from the gardens—it was he who fascinated the woman. And since she loved him, she was proud that his intelligence enfolded her own.

The physical man, Routledge, all men had found excellent in those good days before the mystery. His endurance and bravery had formed many classics for his craft. He had always bewitched her father. Incidentally, her life among the many friends of her father—soldiers, seamen, and civilian campaigners—had taught her that man’s judgment for man is best.... But it was not Routledge, the fearless and tireless; not Routledge, the male, who called her so ardently this night. At least, it was less the male than the mind; and less the mind than the mystic.... It would be the idlest affectation to assert that actual marriage with Routledge was beyond the pale of her thoughts; and yet this was not her ultimate passion. To be with him in great wanderings of gentle purport; to meet the suns and storms with calmness and cheer; constantly to toil together, helping, meditating, always together on the world’s highways, always looking toward God’s Good Hope, with thoughts in the stars, but not so lost in the stars that they missed the sorrowing by the roadside;—wandering grateful for life together, having a tear for the helpless, a smile for the beautiful, and a love for each other so vast and pure that it must needs love the world and reflect the love of God.... Such was Noreen Cardinegh’s dream of the fullness of days—so great a gratitude to the Most High for the presence of her lover, that it would manifest itself in eternal services to those who could not be so happy—services that faltered before no pain, quailed before no horrent spectacle, and retained their sweet savor in the lowliest haunts of men.

Marriage.... It might come. In some garden of the world, there might be a halting, when the full tides of life swelled together. No fixed date, exterior formality; no words uttered by a Third could release these two for triumphant nuptial flight!... She had seen too much mangling of this intimate and portentous moment between man and woman, by a stranger, the member of a paid profession—how often the mere licensed liberator of lusts. A signal from him, as to runners set for a Marathon—the spirit of chastity already a ghost....

If she should some time turn in the day’s journey and meet in the eyes of Cosmo Routledge that challenge which startled her into full-length a woman—with old Nature’s anthem flooding her vein and brain—then of all times, in their incarnation, would there be but the hand of the conqueror to lead her to the place the earth-gods had made ready!... After that, the formalities, the blessings—and the law which, being good for the many, is necessary for all....

She leaned against the mantel and closed her eyes, trying to find her lover’s lodge this night in the wilderness of the world.

“Nor—Noreen!”

The voice, rough, charged with fright in itself, shook the woman to the very roots of her life. Her whole psychic force had winged away to find the mate; only her body was in the silent room in Cheer Street. There is a thrilling hurt in the sudden intrusion of physical force upon such contemplation. She ran to her father’s room.

“Eh, Gawd! I—I was dreaming, child,” he mumbled, as she entered the dark where he lay.

FOURTEENTH CHAPTER
ROUTLEDGE IS ASSURED OF A WOMAN’S LOVE—THOUGH HE SHOULD LEAD THE ARMIES OF THE WORLD TO BURN LONDON

Hai, Johnny Brodie of Bookstalls, there’s a sweet lady looking for you! Possibly you know it, scamp, and are tricking from doorway to doorway behind her carriage, and grinning because those of whom she inquires don’t know a little maverick like you.... You think she is out to do harm to the Man; and you won’t be caught with her elbows on your knees again, and her great gold-brown eyes boring into your hard head where the Man’s sacred secrets are!... Perhaps you will, after all, Johnny Brodie, but it will be after this narrative (when there are lights again in that room of mystery and enchantment across the hall), and the Man is back in Bookstalls, there being no further need of secrets.... The Hate of London will never change direction by reason of gossip of yours, Johnny Brodie, because “the best fellows in this world are those strong enough to hold their tongues at the right time.” You learned that lesson, Manikin. Did you learn the other so well—about it not being good to do a thing alone, which you wouldn’t do if the one you liked best in the world were watching? That’s a harder lesson.... No, it won’t be your revelation of that impregnable night which brings the outcast into love and laurels, but so badly have you frightened a poor old man that he is about to rush half around the world to avoid meeting you again—instead of dying in Cheer Street.... Your short-trousered part in these events ended with the slam of the Cheer Street door, Johnny Brodie—but God love you, little boy, and Johnny Brodies everywhere!...

The next morning, and thrice in the week following, Noreen Cardinegh drove to Bookstalls and threaded the unkempt way up and down in vain for the boy. She had failed to learn the name of the pastry-cook who employed him, and it would have been her last thought to seek him in the house of Routledge’s lodgings. Though a familiar in Bookstalls, he was an unfiled human document of the ancient highway; and always she returned to Cheer Street profitless.... It would be merciless to question her father; and yet he seemed to divine her anxiety to find the boy, and to fear her success as a visitation of death. It was hard for her to see him, the man whose courage had been a point of British comment for forty years, white, shaken, and exhausted from suspense when she returned from Bookstalls. Still, he dared not ask if she had seen the boy; and she did not confess that she had been searching.

Her only line on the mystery was to this effect: Routledge, though innocent, was blamed by England for some appalling, unmentionable crime, openly unpunishable. Her father and a few others knew the specific charge. Routledge had not known this at the Armory, but knew it the morning afterward. Meanwhile, her father and Johnny Brodie had been with him. All the boy’s actions denoted that he knew something, possibly a great deal in a fragmentary way, which she might be able to piece together into an illumination. He must have known something, since he apparently had been pledged to silence. At all events, he was lost.

It must be understood that Noreen’s conviction of her father’s integrity had never been shaken. It was more than a family faith. His life had been as a record accessible to all men. It did not even occur to her to build a system of reasoning upon the hypothesis of any guilt of his, even though much was strange and foreboding. She had heard her father mutter that a war would bring Routledge out of his lair. She could not forget that her father had come back from India on the day of the Reception, all consumed and brain-numbed from strain. For a moment in her arms he had broken completely—acting like one who was to be dragged from her to the gallows. The next morning, after his return to Cheer Street from Routledge, the tension was gone.

Comparative peace had endured, with only an occasional restless interval, until the sight of the Bookstalls boy had filled him with inexplicable dread. His condition when she returned from her fourth journey to Bookstalls was such that she determined not to go again. One of two results was inevitable if this devouring tension was not speedily relaxed—utter insanity or swift death. One more circumstance in this connection intensified the mystery, even though it gave her gladness—her father’s toast to the outcast, the toast that was drunk alone. He was without that poisonous personal hatred which the others manifested toward Routledge. All these thoughts had worn grooves in her mind from much passing, but they did not evolve her father’s shame.

Throughout the week, the correspondents had dropped in by twos and threes to bid them good-by. Negotiations were at a dead-lock, and the London dailies wanted their men on the spot for eventualities. Most of the men were going west to the Far East—the twenty-five day route, via America. Some one, however, mentioned Suez, and the name was on Jerry Cardinegh’s lips for an entire afternoon. At dinner his idea broke into words:

“Come, deere, we must pack to-night. We’re off to-morrow for Japan on the P. & O. liner, Carthusian. We can smell the ruction in Japan—and it’s a good place to live. London—aye, God, the old town is murdering me!”

She had thought of it many times, but until last week her father had been happy in Cheer Street, entirely immune to the war ferment. Noreen understood what had turned London into an iron pressure—one little boy, lost in din and fog and multitudes. She was glad to go away.

The first few days at sea helped her father, but the improvement did not last. They travelled very leisurely, sometimes stopping over a ship in different ports. It was with a quickened heart that the woman saw the Indian coast again after several years. Routledge was intricately identified with the India of her mind now, and she knew that somewhere in India he was living out his exile. Always in those days and nights of watching and labor with the sleepless old man who was leaving her hourly, with the accelerated speed of a river that nears its falls, she was thrilled with the hope that Bombay or Madras or Calcutta would give her some living word of the outcast. She hardly hoped to see Routledge; but with a triple hunger she yearned to hear that he lived, even to hear his name uttered by some one in whom the mystery had inspired hatred.... But the Indian ports furnished nothing concerning Routledge. They revived, however (and in her maturity), the half-formed impressions of her girlhood on the Anglo-Indians and their life. To observe and despise certain aspects of the ruling people was as certain a heritage from her father as was that fairer evolution of the spirit with which she had been blest by some elder lineage.

The English at Home, Noreen had ever regarded with a mental reservation, or two; and with those telling, divining eyes which are not rarely filled with Irish light. She had repressed and even tried to root out an instinctive animus for certain monuments and institutions large in British life; she tried constantly to shut her eyes to that quarry of self-infatuation, perdition deep, from which these monuments and institutions were carved. She came to triumph over her critical impulses at home, partly because her incisive barbs were dulled by constant contact and repetition—but India again after the few vital years of growth!... Londoners might forget themselves for an hour or two a day on the Thames. They allowed it to be taken for granted an hour or two a day at Home that they were English. In India, they were more English than the English.

It must not be forgotten that Noreen Cardinegh’s mind was the arena of interminable rebellion against the banishment of Routledge. All Englishmen of rank arrayed themselves in contrast to him. She knew that this was wrong, useless; that the energy which spent itself in contrasting to the disfavor of the English, reacted with a hurt to her own finest nature, but she could not help it now. As a daughter of Jerry Cardinegh, she could not be free from something of his passion; moreover, body and brain, she was spent in his service. There were vast areas of unhealed tissue within her—the agony of a daughter of strong devotion, and the agony of a woman whose romance is mined and countermined. So it was a weary and supersensitive nature that caught its new series of impressions of Anglo-Indian life—the life of pegs and chits; men moving in a circle like those lost in the woods; men speaking of their livers as of members of the family; hot, heavy dinners; the religious, life-and-death ceremony of eating and drinking; the arrogant assumption of superiority over the native, and each separate foreigner a cyst of the great British drain! Such were the men of the Indian ports to whom the name of Cosmo Routledge was as black magic. It all came back to her like an ugly dream, and it is not strange that she returned speedily to her ships to cleanse herself from her thoughts in the prophylactic sea-winds.

A day north out of Hong Kong on one of the Empress steamers, Noreen drew her chair to a sheltered place on the promenade to rest an hour. The afternoon was keen and renovating after the slow days of heat in the Indian Ocean. Two Americans were standing at a little distance, and one was speaking with animation. A sentence of his reached the woman’s ears from time to time, between boisterous rushes of wind.... “One of the best talkers I ever heard in my life.”... “No personal hate about it.”... “Literally quartered England and fed her to the pigs.”... “No, wouldn’t give me his name, but I learned it.”... “When I mentioned his name afterward to an Englishman, he turned pale, as if I had turned loose the devil.”... “Speaking of famine conditions, this Routledge——”

Mr. Jasper, whose Indian studies had been put aside for the time by the pressing call of human interest to Tokyo, turned quickly just now at the touch of a hand upon his sleeve, and found a woman whose face he is still remembering—even as he enjoys recalling all the words and phrases of the mysterious stranger of Rydamphur.

“Forgive me, sir,” Noreen panted, “but I could not help overhearing something you said. You—you mentioned a name that is very dear to me—Routledge!”

“I did—yes. A man I met in Rydamphur, of the Central Provinces of India. Excuse me, did you say he was dear to you?”

“Yes.”

“That is so queer—a rather pleasant surprise for me. Others have felt differently about Routledge. Are you sure you mean this man—a very tall fellow of thirty-three or thirty-four, with a thin, dark, striking face, and a striking way of putting things in words?”

“Yes,” she said breathlessly.

Jasper offered his card.

“I am Miss Cardinegh, Mr. Jasper. Won’t you please tell me all that you can about him. It means so much to me.... Shall we go into the reading-room?”

Jasper assented, begging leave from his companion.... They sat down together, and the American restored Rydamphur from memory. Since he had thought much of his day and night in that little centre of suffering, he built the picture rather well. He described the manner of Routledge, and related a few of the famine facts as he had drawn them in that evening-hour at the Rest House.

“As I look back on it all, there is a queer atmosphere about the whole affair,” said Jasper. “Such a place I never have known, as that little dining-room in Rydamphur. Mr. Routledge seemed to grasp at once that my interest was sincere. His mind was filled with the pith of things I wanted to learn. No Englishman seemed to be able to talk impersonally on the famine.... I’ll never forget the baking night in that house. The punkahs jerked every moment or so, as if the coolie had stopped to scratch himself. There was a cat-footed servant hanging about, and the lamps were turned low—as if a bright flame could not live in that burned air.”

Mr. Jasper took evident pleasure in the intensity of interest his narrative inspired. “But first I must tell you, Miss Cardinegh,” he went on, “that just as I entered the town in the afternoon, I passed a little hut with an open door. The breath that came out to me, I’ll not attempt to describe: only to say that there was in it more than realism. I had come far to see a real famine, and this was my first lesson. A few steps on from the hut, I turned to see a white man coming out. It was not Mr. Routledge, but a smaller man, dressed in native garb. I have thought much of his face. It had a look as if all the tragedies that a man can know had beaten upon it; and yet it was so strong and so calm.... It was all like a dream to me. Then this wonderful talk with Mr. Routledge at dinner. Afterward, I asked his name, but he withheld it laughingly—in such a way that I took no offense—only wondered at it.”

“But you learned his name——”

“Yes, I will tell you. That night after he left me, I went to my room and thought a long time on the things he had said. I remember one of his sayings impressed me greatly—that we of the occident had learned to suffer only through our excesses—but India through her famines. He intimated that the latter process is better for the soul.... It was too hot to think of sleep, so I went out to walk in that still, stricken place. At the far end of the street, I saw a candle-light and heard the voice of a white man. And that voice I shall never forget—so low was it, so thrilling and gentle. I remember the words—they were printed on some inner wall of my brain. This is what the voice said:

“‘... Night and morning, I shall send you my blessing, Routledge, my brother. Morning and evening, until we meet again in the Leper Valley, you shall know that there is a heart that longs for the good of your life and your soul. Good-by.’... I hurried back, lest it be thought that I was eavesdropping. The man who spoke was the white man in native garb who had emerged in the afternoon from that hut of unburied dead. The man whom he addressed as ‘Routledge’—and thus I learned his name—was the one who had talked to me so brilliantly at dinner. A third sat in the candle-light—a very aged Hindu.... It is all very memorable to me, Miss Cardinegh.”

Again and again he told the story, or parts of it, to the woman; also of the doings of Routledge the next morning, before the English came. Noreen thanked him brokenly at last and hurried back to her father’s state-room. Mr. Jasper saw very little of the lady during the rest of the voyage, and lost her entirely at Shanghai, where in stopping over he is left behind the movement of the present narrative—a worthy, growing American who will have much to tell his sister of Madras and the interior, in spite of missing the illustrious Annie Besant, pronounced “Bessant” for esoteric reasons.

The incident was like oxygen to the tired woman. Nearing Shanghai, the Empress steamer nosed the winter zone, and Jerry Cardinegh was not well enough to go ashore. Noreen had shopping to do, and took the afternoon launch up the river for an hour in the city. Snow was falling. On the Bund, Noreen encountered Finacune, who had come down from Tokyo to get a glance at affairs from the outside. He declared that little or nothing was to be learned in the Japanese capital. Already the nation was constructing an impenetrable atmosphere about her great war. Finacune was going back on the Empress. As the time was short, they parted to attend their several errands, planning to meet at the launch later.

With her parcels, Noreen hurried back from the shops to the Bund in the winter twilight. Finacune, who had not seen her, was fifty feet ahead, also making for the water-front. She saw him stop short, stare for an instant at the profile of a huge, gaunt figure—in the great frieze coat! It was then that the mighty leap of her heart forced a cry from her throat.... Routledge, staring out over the darkening river, started at her voice and the touch of her hand. For a moment he pressed his fingers against his eyes as if trying to shut out some haunt from his brain. Then he, spoke slowly:

“I did not think that there were substances fine enough in the world to make a woman so beautiful——”

“Routledge-san! Oh, God, there is only a moment or two!”

“I should not have been here,” he began vaguely. “Some one may see you talking with me.”

“Don’t speak of that!... Oh, words are such puny things now! I thought we understood each other about that. Tell me, are you ill? You look——”

“No, not ill, Noreen. I shall be tiptop when I get up yonder into the field.... You startled me. I think I was in a kind of dream about you, and then you——” The old dread returned to his mind. He wondered if the man who had passed had been Finacune. “Are you alone? I wouldn’t have anybody see you talking to me.”

All that was in her heart was called forth by the spectacle of her giant’s pallor and seeming weakness. Proudly she put all this into words:

“I would not care if the whole world saw me with you. It is the same with me—as I told you on the way to Charing Cross! What you may think—does not make me afraid. You have done no wrong. I want to be with you—but the time is not yet come. It is dreadful. Why do you forget all that we told each other—all that I told you?”

“I have not forgotten,” he said huskily. “The scars of that hour in the carriage—leaving you that hour—would not suffer me to forget, but I should not speak this way. I wrong you speaking this way. I am only a world-tramp between wars.... And this war I must watch alone—from the edge where the others do not go. God, what a coward I should be—to chance your happiness——”

The launch whistled—a tearing in her brain. The call to her father was instant and inexorable.... But she clung to Routledge—drew him to the very edge of the stone-pier, blind to the glances of men and women who brushed by.

“Quick, tell me of Jerry!” he said. “Is he out for the war?”

“My father is dying a slow death out yonder on the ship. I must go to him. Already he is dead to wars and friends—all but dead to me!” She added imperiously, “When my work is finished with him, I shall keep my promise, Routledge-san. I shall come to you!”

“No—I’m going where you could not follow——”

“I shall find you!”

“But I have nothing between wars—no British press now, Noreen—only a begging-bowl in India. Why, my name is a whispered hate!... Just a begging-bowl in India, Noreen—and your sweet faith in me.”

She was splendid in the ardor of her answer:

“That begging-bowl in India—I shall carry and share with you! I shall take for mine—that name of whispered hate!... Routledge-san, you have done no wrong—but I should love you, if you led the armies of the world—to burn London!”

He helped her aboard, as the bow was putting out into the river. “In a time like this there are not big enough words for you, Noreen Cardinegh.”

“Oh, Routledge-san,—until I come, take care of your life for me!” she called.... Then, fearless, full-voiced, she added, standing in the snowy dusk: “And when I come—I shall take care of your life for you—even in the Leper Valley!”

He watched her through the big, slow-falling flakes, until the launch disappeared behind the white stern of an American gunboat.

FIFTEENTH CHAPTER
NOREEN CARDINEGH APPEARS AFTER MIDNIGHT IN THE BILLIARD-ROOM OF THE IMPERIAL—AN INEFFABLE REMEMBRANCE

Finacune caught a train for Tokyo, after disembarking at Yokohama, an hour or two before the Cardineghs. He wanted to prepare the way at the Imperial for the coming of the dean and his daughter. It was dark when he reached Shimbashi station and crossed the Ginza to the now-famous hotel. Certain of the English correspondents were gathered in the lobby, it being not yet time to dress for dinner. These Finacune beckoned to the billiard-room, and, standing at the head of the farthest table, glanced over the faces to be sure that none but the trusted British were present. Then he whispered impressively:

“Scene: the Bund at Shanghai, snowy twilight; time, five days ago. Looking out upon the darkening river, ‘... a face thin as a dead camel’s and yellow-white like coral!’ That’s one of his own sentences, and God pity or punish the sorrow of his face—as you like——”

“Cut out the scenario,” ordered Bingley. “Who was it?”

“The great frieze coat.”

Bingley was first to break the silence.

“Nice raw state of affairs,” he remarked savagely. “I s’pose he has caught on with one of those fluttered newspapers of New York. They are grabbing up anybody over here, even the remittance-men, so they won’t have to pay expenses out. Rather raw deal, I call it,—to be forced to ride with a traitor in this campaign.”

It was the austere Feeney who answered darkly, “Recall, ‘Horse-killer,’ that Routledge rides alone.”

“I can’t see yet why the secret service doesn’t delegate a man to get him,” Bingley whispered.

They had not heard that a venture of the kind had failed at Madras.

“There is a time for all things,” Feeney replied. “England never forgets a man like——”

“Are you quite sure of the face you saw?” inquired Benton Day, the new man of the Review. His tone was troubled. His work was cut out for him—to keep up the war-reputation of the old paper of fat columns.

“Surely,” Finacune said cheerfully, “unless the bottom dropped out of my brain-pan.”

Trollope sniffed ponderously, and was about to comment when the little man of the Word resumed:

“Also, I am permitted to say—and this with a great and sweet joy—that our dean, war’s own favorite, Jerry Cardinegh, came up with me from Shanghai on the Empress, and that he will be here to-night with his daughter, Miss Noreen.”

The announcement was acclaimed.

“I heard he was coming,” said Feeney, “but how am I to meet the old champion—me, holding down his old chair-of-war on the Witness.”

“He’ll never think of it,” said Finacune. “Old Jerry is nearly out of sight—over the bay. He didn’t leave his state-room coming up—only let me see him once. His daughter is with him day and night. The old man thought he’d like to get into the zone of war once more—before he goes out on the last campaign, where we all ride alone.”

It is to be observed that the little Word man did not tell all he saw on the Bund at Shanghai.

The men repaired to the buffet to break the strain. Those were heavy days—those early February days in Tokyo. War was inevitable, but not declared. Tokyo was sort of pleased at her own forbearance. The vaccine of European civilization had worked with fullness and dispatch. Here was proof: the Russian minister had been allowed to clear, double-eyed and teeth still straight. The mobs in the street did not profess to understand the value of allowing the enemy to depart personally intact—but it was being civilized. The world was watching the young yellow nation’s first venture in humane war; after which, if she conducted herself prettily, the world would be pleased to admit her into the first flight of the powers, where all things having to do with economy, polity, expansion, revenue, and survival are done in a finished fashion. England was watching—and stood behind her. Japan must conduct herself in such a way as not to drag England into the conflict.

Japanese infants played soldiers; Japanese policemen played soldiers; rickshaw coolies, beneath the contempt of a soldier, dreamed of future incarnations when they should evolve into soldiers; Japanese merchants snuffled, rubbed their damp hands together, and wept internally because the Great Wheel of Fate had not skited them off into the military class, instead of among the low-brows of the shops. And the soldiers themselves—how they strutted and performed in the streets, critically mirroring each other and bowing profoundly, blind to all glory and sorrow not of the soldier, and important as a grist of young doctors just turned loose with their diplomas among the ills of the world.... Aye, funny and pitiful, the young Power looked in its Western pants and guns.

What did England think—smiling back at the peace of her Indian borders—of these wee, wet-nosed, scabby-headed Islanders (with their queer little cruet-stands buckled between their kidneys), in full cry with “Banzai Niphon” from cape to cape? What England thought was not what England said, as she reserved the front pages of her daily press for Japanese victories—whether or no. Not exactly an ally in spirit was wise old England, but an ally in letterpress—the veriest Titan of a press-agent.... Funny and pitiable indeed was the ranting, tramping Japanese infantry in the streets of Tokyo—funnier than stage infantry—quite like string-pulled marionettes of papier maché; but let the truth be told, the truth that rises clear from the final adjustment of objects in the perspective: The oil of all the chlorates, nitrates, and fulminates filled those queer little kidney-cruets; and these same little Japanese infantrymen proved packages—papier maché packages, if you like—of lyddite, bellite, cordite, romite, hellite, and other boiled-down cyclones.

On one of those ugly gray afternoons of early February, Benton Day of the Review received a cablegram from his chief in London, Dartmore. There are few men who would express themselves ironically by cable at the London-Tokyo rate of toll. Dartmore did it, and the message follows, with flesh and organs added to the cipher-skeleton:

The Review thought you would be interested to know that Japan has declared war and smashed part of the Russian fleet. This news from New York. Kindly inform Tokyo war-office, which I understand is just a step from your hotel.

Benton Day had come up from common things by strong, hard, well-planned work. He had known few defeats, and these cut deeply. The cable from Dartmore was the worst whipping of his career. Gray with shame, he sought the billiard-room of the hotel, where he found an animated group of British and American correspondents who had just heard the news—ten hours after it had been printed in London and New York. He found that Dartmore alone had taken pains to be ironical in the matter. The truth was exactly as ungetatable in Tokyo as in Mombassa—until the war-office chose to give it up. Benton Day was only to blame in so far as he was not a telepathist. This knowledge eased him greatly, but did not detract from his anger at Dartmore—an emotion which is bad for a young man to take out on his first big campaign. The little sentence in the cablegram regarding the fact that London had received the news from New York, held big interest for Feeney, the saturnine.

“Japan was busy last night,” he communed. “Her Mr. Togo smashed the Russians off Port Arthur, and her little Mr. Uriu, off Chemulpo. It’s about time,” he added with a trace of Indiana humor, “Japan was declaring war. But the thing that gets me is, how did New York know?... Finacune, my young friend, was it you who suggested something about the great frieze coat catching on with New York papers?”

Harrowing weeks at the Imperial followed, while armies augmented, navies fought in the dark, and the bearers of the light of the world made newspaper copy out of heathen temples and Japanese street scenes. Free lances fled to outer ports, there to hearken unto the tales of refugees and weary the world. And the names of these, the Japanese carefully ticketed to Failure, and severed from Opportunity forever.

The Blue Boar, Trollope, wore best of all. He bathed in many springs throughout the empire, peeked into strange quarters of both capitals, and ate and drank after the fashion of those who are formed of arcs and not of angles. From time to time he cabled his paper three words of hope, and eight words of expense account. Trollope strolled down the menus in all parts of Niphon—native and European menus—with fine relish, and waited serenely for the time when he should lean and harden in the field, his sleeves rolled up—one hand covering the strategy of armies, the other at a cable-end, and his sweating face reflecting the pink and pearly flush of fame.

It was not so with the others. Finacune was ragged and restless. The pale Talliaferro looked twice for his own shadow. Feeney’s dark fighting-face wasted and hardened, until it seemed hewn from a block of brown bone; and Trollope’s serene and changeless calm wrought upon Bingley’s nerves like an active poison.

These two did not pretend to speak at the last. The Horse-killer took on the look (his gray eyes were cold and immutable as corner stones, anyway) as if he would spur over a sea of dead men’s faces to get a big tale and a free cable. It would not have been so bad except that the London papers, coming in now with the first cables of the correspondents, showed a consistent garbling and distortion of their reports. Home writers occupied miles of space, placed Togo along with Lord Nelson, and Mutsuhito with Gladstone—a deep planned, conscienceless campaign of fact-mutilation for the extolling of Japanese character and mettle. New York, young in war-handling, was inclined to follow London’s diplomatic lead, against the reports of her own men. February and March ended before the first batch of the British correspondents were informed that they could take the field with Kuroki’s first army.

Feeney and Finacune remained in the billiard-room that last night at the Imperial, long after the rest had gone. These two men had pulled apart from the others in pulling together—the most florid with the dullest of writers; the showiest with the deepest. It had been an evening of rousing festivity. Possibly because these two had drunk less than the others; or possibly because their hopes for the field had been prolonged and mangled for such a length of time that they could not sleep now until they were actually booming down the Tokaido, Feeney and Finacune were billiarding idly after one o’clock in the morning and cooling the fever of the night’s stronger spirits with long, chilled glasses of soda, lightly flavored with Rhenish wine.

Jerry Cardinegh had come down for a moment early in the evening for a word of parting. For days none had seen him below; and only a few of his older friends were admitted to the big, dim room, overlooking the park of the Government buildings—where a woman lived and moved, lost to light and darkness, and struggled every inch with the swift encroachments of the inevitable. Noreen’s father relied upon her, as upon air and a place to lie. God knows what vitality he drew from the strong fountains of her life to sustain his last days.

Incessantly active, Noreen Cardinegh was worn to a brighter lustre, as if fatigue brought out the fineness of her human texture—a superlative woman who held her place and her dreams. Finacune had loved her for years. He was closer to her own romance than any of her father’s friends; and the little man perceived with an agony of which few would have thought him capable, that his own chance was not worth the embarrassment of telling her. Indeed, Finacune told no one. This was his best room, and locked. Noreen Cardinegh was the image there, beyond words, almost an abstraction. This Word man was rather a choice spirit, if not a great one. He was thinking of Noreen now, as he knocked the balls around. She had appeared with her father earlier in the night, and had stood behind him under the old Moorish arch at the entrance to the billiard-room—darkness behind her, and a low table-chandelier in front....

Finacune was thinking, too, of the old man whom she had helped down-stairs to say good-by to the boys. Cardinegh had been his boyish ideal. He would not be seen again—and what a ghastly travesty was his last appearance!... Jerry had entered walking rigidly, his limbs like wood, a suggestion of chaos in the shaking, aimless hands; the shaven face all fallen about the mouth; all the stirring history of an earth-wise man, censored and blotted from the flame-rimmed eyes; the temples blotched with crimson and the mind struggling with its débris like Gilliat against sea and sand and sky. And the words the dean had uttered—nothings that meant death.

Feeney had just carefully and neatly made a three-cushion carom, with the remark that he could do it again on horseback, when there was a light, swift tread upon the stairway, a rushing in the hall, light as a blown paper, and Noreen Cardinegh burst upon them—half a torrent, half a spirit, indescribable altogether. The souls of the two men divined her message before she spoke, but their brains were slower. And their eyes were startled. To Finacune, it became an ineffable portrait—the frightened face, white as pearl and set in gold; the dark silk waist, unfastened at the throat; the red-gold hair dressed and wound seemingly in Mother Nature’s winds; the face refined in the whitest fires of earth; her eyes like twin suns behind smoked glass; and the lips of Noreen—lips like the mother of a prophet.

“Oh, come quickly!” she said, and was gone.

Finacune dashed up the stairway three at a stride, but he never overtook her—a fact for profound speculation afterward. She was bending over the edge of the bed, sustaining her father, when he entered. Cardinegh stared at him wildly for a second; then hearkened to Feeney’s footsteps in the hall. When the latter entered, the dean turned imploringly to his daughter.

“Where’s Routledge?” he gasped. “He said he’d come back.”

A single jet of gas was burning in the big room. With a nod of her head, Noreen signified for the men to answer.

“I haven’t heard from him, Jerry,” Feeney faltered.

“Eh, Gawd!—he’d better come quickly—or he won’t see old Jerry. I’m going out—not with you, boys—but afield. I want to see Routledge. He said he’d come back and bring his book—done under the pressure of British hate. I told you, didn’t I—he took the hate from me?... I told Noreen.... Feeney! Finacune!... It was I who gave the Russian spies the Shubar Khan papers!... Don’t leave me, Noreen. Pour me a last drink, Feeney.... Gawd! but I’ve travelled in the shadow of death for two years—afraid—afraid to tell—afraid of his coming back! I can see now—he wouldn’t come back!... I’m not afraid now—but I’ve had my hell two years.... You would have found it in my papers, Noreen. Show them to the men—cable the truth to London——”

“Jerry, Jerry,” whispered old Feeney, who was stricken, “did Ireland get the best of you at the last?”

Finacune nudged him angrily. “Jerry,” he exclaimed, “don’t go out with this stuff on your lips. We know you’re doing it for Routledge——”

The woman turned upon him, but did not speak.

“I did it for Ireland—but it failed!” Cardinegh answered. “These brown mongrels are fighting in Manchuria the Russians that England should have fought on the Indian border!... Eh, Gawd!—the dark has been long a-liftin’, deere—but it’s gone—and you know from me, without the papers!... Ah, Nory, child of my heart——” He was straining upward toward her face, as if he could not see her well. “... ’Tis your mother—’tis your mother—I’m off, darlin’——”

“The old toast,” Feeney muttered. “It came true—the toast we all stood to in Calcutta!”

The woman held but the ashes of a man in her arms, and they drew her away at last. They thought from the look of her face that she would fall, but she did not. Instead, she said with sudden swiftness:

“Here are the papers. He told me all, just before I called for you. I wanted you both to hear. It is true. You must cable to-night to the war-office in London—to the owners of your papers—to all those who know the story. Then the secret service must be told—lest they do Routledge-san further hurt. It must be done now. Tell the other men to cable before they go out. I will cable, too.... My father is guilty. We went back to Tyrone before the Bhurpal trouble—to the little town where he found my mother, in Tyrone. When he saw the British troops quartered on that starving, sunken little place—his mind gave way. He had the papers then, which he gave afterward to the Russian spies!”

All this the woman spoke before she wept.

SIXTEENTH CHAPTER
CERTAIN CIVILIANS SIT TIGHT WITH KUROKI, WHILE THE BLOOD-FLOWER PUTS FORTH HER BRIGHT LITTLE BUDS

They were in a troop-train at last, down the Tokaido, the old cedar-lined highway of the daimios,—Feeney, Finacune, Trollope, Bingley, other English and as many more Americans. The road was a brown streak of troop-laden trains off to embarkation ports. Japan was sending out her willing wealth of men to a brown and sullen land of such distances as would balk the short-sighted Japanese eye, so used to toy sizes in all things—toy trees, terraces, hills, and roads, whose ends are mostly in view. These men were off to fight now in the outer court of “the last and the largest empire, whose map is but half unrolled.”

Bingley was sitting apart as usual, already in puttees and Bedford cords, a blanket-roll underfoot and a light, travelling type-mill in a leather-case by his side. Bingley was brimming with the morbid, moody passion for Bingley triumphs. A great type of the militant Englishman this, with his stiff jaw and strong-seasoned blood, utterly painless to almost everything but the spur of ambition; identified peculiarly, penetratingly, with Bingley and no other; the six feet of animal named Bingley, in a soft shirt and Bingley cords. He was sombrely glad this April morning to be started for the field at last. Presently the Thames, London, the world, would hear the name of Bingley again—and the name would mean a giant grappling with “monster heroisms” in the midst of Asia and armies. The revelation and death of Jerry Cardinegh the night before had a personal aspect from Bingley’s point of view. It was that Routledge, vindicated, would have a free hand again. He would probably oust Benton Day from the Review and seek to regain his old supremacy. Routledge would require lots of handling, delicate and daring, to be downed and dimmed.

To Feeney and Finacune, the events of the night before had taken a place among the great military crises of their experience. They had cabled the morning hours away, as the other Englishmen had done, urged by the woman. Indeed, the American correspondents were not a little disturbed by the unwonted activity of the Londoners at a time when, to them, all was done. What the confession of Jerry Cardinegh meant to the English is difficult adequately to express. Routledge had always been outré and mysterious. The great treachery adjusted itself to him with a degree of readiness, since it is easier to identify a brilliant crime with an individual held loftily, than with one in the more immediate reaches of the public comprehension. But that old Jerry, their dean, their master of many services, their idol and chief, should have turned this appalling trick against the British arms which he had helped to make famous—this was a heart-jolt which bruised the twinings of a hundred sentiments. Feeney was an Irishman, and could understand the Cardinegh-passion, probably better than the others, but he could not understand its expression in treachery. To him there was only one explanation—madness....

They discerned the Pacific from the Hankone mountains, boomed through big, strange towns to Kyoto; then Sasebo, the troop-ships, and the landing at a Korean base, where they learned with bitterness that a second siege of waiting had just begun. The world outside now was but a wordless buzzing of voices, as from a locked room. They were at Anju when the first brush happened at Chengju (a neat little rout of Cossacks). They were at Chengju when Kuroki occupied Wiju, regardless of the growling of the Bear. They were at Yongampho, in the last few hours of April, when Kuroki crossed the Yalu, ten miles northeast, and fought the first great battle, named after the river. Always it was this way—a day or two’s march behind the business-end of the army.

It had been a dead delay in Tokyo; but it was a wait lively with aggravations now—the wisp of fragrant hay forever dangling in scent. An English military attaché arriving late from Seoul brought the word that the cables of the correspondents reached their papers from seven to fifteen days late; and then with lineaments of the text effaced by censorship—stale, egoless, costly messages. At this word one of the American scribes crumpled under the strain and went out into the Yellow Sea in a junk, a mad dream in his brain to meet the sea-god, Togo, face to face. Old Feeney, accustomed to discuss strategies with generals, was spurred to such a distemper that he cabled to be recalled. It is significant that his message was the first of the war to go through the Japanese censor untouched by the blue pencil.

Aye, and when the silent red stream of wounded began to trickle back from the Yalu fight, it required a man to keep himself reined down to a fox-trot. It was color, war-color, this back-throw from the weltering fields. Even this stopped, and Kuroki seemed hung forever in the hills about Fengwangcheng. The civilians breathed hard those weeks, and lived in an atmosphere burned from human rage. Always excepting Trollope, the Blue Boar, who had a feeling for China. He studied the deep, rutty Chinese roads through the hills (back of the army), some of them worn into formidable ravines—eroded by bare human feet and the showers of centuries. There were strange little shrines and monasteries high in those grim hills, and Trollope filled a note-book with their names and history. There are strata of mystery under the cuticle of China of which the raw young mind of the white man can only conceive a tithe—and then only in the ecstasy of concentration. And what names he found—Road of the Purple Emperor; Spring of the Whispering Spirit; Cascade of the Humming-bird’s Wing; Cataract of the Sombre Clouds; Grotto of the Adulteress’ Death—not names of mere flowery choosing, but names made florid by the necessities of a people whose history is so long that a poetic glamour has fallen upon it. And the Blue Boar found much to eat of a weird flavory sort, and kept his poundage.

What strategy was this which held a big, fat, pompous army inactive through a golden month of campaigning like this June? Bingley exclaimed that Kuroki was so inflated by the Yalu victory that he was content to hunt butterflies for the rest of the summer. The rumble of real war reached the writers from time to time. Apparently, the other Japanese generals were not like this gray-haired Fabius—Kuroki of the first army. A man named Oku, it was reported, had landed a second army at Pitsewo, half-way down the east coast of Liaotung, had bored straightway across some devilishly steep passes and cut off the fortress, Port Arthur, from the mainland. The story of this fight was insufferable poison to the white men with Kuroki. It had taken place on a narrow neck of land, where sits high the town of Kinchow, joining the little peninsula of the fortress to the big Liao peninsula above. The rock-collared neck of land is memorable now by a hill called Nanshan—the battle’s name. Oku burned five thousand dead after the fight, but he had cut off Port Arthur for the siege, and made possible the landing of one Nogi with a third Japanese army at Dalny—cheap at twice the price. Japanese gunboats and torpedoes at sea on the west had helped Oku get the strangle-hold on the neck of land, while a Russian fleet had bombarded from the bay on the east. What torture to believe this—that at last in the history of the world armies and navies had met in a single action! It was almost unthinkable to be camping with Kuroki in the ancient Chinese hills, while such a panorama unfolded for the eyes of other men—a battle such as the gods would put on flesh to witness.

Finally the word was brought in by the Chinese, who knew all things, that this jumping-bean, Oku, had left the fortress to Nogi and the third army, and leaped north to join a fourth army, under Nodzu, who had effected a perfect landing at Takushan. Oku whipped poor Stackelberg on the journey, Telissu being the historic title of this incident of his flying march. Thus Yalu, Nanshan, and Telissu were fought without even a smell of smoke for Bingley, Feeney, Finacune, Trollope, and others. It is to be noted that even Trollope blanched at the great war story the world missed by not letting him in on Nanshan. That was one battle for a Tolstoi. The English civilians sat together on a breezy, sweet-scented hill and watched the sun go down on one of those June evenings. Feeney was writing, the pad resting upon his knee.

“What did you say was the name of your new book?” Finacune inquired.

“‘Sitting Tight with Kuroki; or, The Wild Flowers of Manchuria,’” grumbled the old man.

Into the group presently came Major Inuki, the Japanese officer assigned to watch over the correspondents, to see that none escaped, to see that none learned anything but generalities, to furnish unlimited courtesy and apologetic ramifications that stretched from Kirin to Port Arthur. Inuki also supplied universes of unverifiable information, having to do with vague Japanese miracles and vast Russian casualties. He took off his hat now and bowed all around, inhaled a long breath with a hiss through his sparkling teeth, and snuffled violently.

“It iss more dan quite possible we will remain here for to-morr’, my dear fren’s. In such case would it not be of good to instruk your servan’s to ereck the tents—more stolidity?”

Feeney reached over and gravely clutched the flapping trouser-leg of his Chinese coolie. “Jean Valjean,” he said, “you are instruk to ereck tents—more stolidity.”

“Me plentee slabee,” said Jean.

The odor of supper was abroad in the camp of the noncombatants, and the twilight was deep in the valley of young corn. Feeney and Finacune ate in silence. These two were closer together—close as only two male adults can be who have lived long alone in broad areas, sharing toil and irritation and peril; apart from women, but akin in memories and ambition. Feeney had ridden with the greatest of the nineteenth-century generals. He was being herded now close to war, but out of range of any good to his calling. He was thinking of Nanshan—what a battle to have added to his string! Finacune was thinking of the world’s greatest woman—how she had come down like a spirit to the billiard-room that last night in Tokyo—and with what exacting zeal she had caused him and the others to cable away the last vestige of glory from the name she bore.

“Blot up another piece of tea, Feeney,” he muttered, “and cheer up.”

“I was just about to suggest, my vivid young friend, that if you spilled any more gloom on this outfit, I should burst into tears,” Feeney replied.

There was a long silence. “What?” said Feeney.

“I’m a hare-lipped cock-roach, if it isn’t wonderful!” Finacune observed in an awed tone.

“What?”

“Suppose now—just now—suppose a white woman—all in a soft summer gown and blowing golden hair—should walk through this camp? Think of it!”

“I did—twenty years ago,” said Feeney.

“Think of it now,” Finacune persisted raptly, leaning back against his saddle with a pot of tea in his hand. “The mere sight of her would jam a sweetheart or a wife, or both, into the brain of every man present—the first kiss or a last, dim light somewhere, a word or a caress—the unspeakable miracle that comes to every man some time—that of a woman giving herself to him!... Ah, that’s it, you old crocodile! It would all come back on live wires—if a woman walked through here—to each man his romance—hot throats, dry lips, and burning eyes. The world holds a woman for us all—even for you, yoked to the war-hag; and if memories were tangible, the right woman would sweep in upon us to-night from five continents and seven seas. A woman! The mere name is a pang to us lonely devils out here in the open, where we blister with hate because we are not allowed to smell blood. Hell!—one would think I had just broken out of a gas-house.”

“Twenty years ago——” Feeney remarked.

“Hark, listen to that young American sing——”

“You listen to me, young man,” Feeney said forcefully. “These lines, with which I am about to cleanse you from carnality are by my young friend Kipling:

“White hands cling to the tightened rein,
Slipping the spur from the booted heel.
Tenderest voices cry, ‘Turn again,’
Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel;
High hopes faint on the warm hearthstone—
He travels the fastest who travels alone.”

“‘Sing the heretical song I have made,’” Finacune added, entirely uncooled.... “I’ve heard fat London club men expatiate for hours on what they might have done if they hadn’t married—the beasts! They couldn’t talk that way to us, sons of Hagar, out here in this unsexed wilderness! I’d tell ’em what it would mean to me—to be married to one woman! It would mean more to me to be allowed to listen to whispered revelations from one woman’s lips—than——”

“Dam’ you, quiet down!”

“Guess I better had.”

“Shall we have a hand at crib?” Feeney asked softly.

“Not now—please.”

There was a dusky splash of red in the sky beyond the western hills, and a faint red foam above. The evening was soft and sweet, and tobacco as fragrant as tropical islands.

“Gad! I’m red-blooded,” Finacune murmured after a moment. “I could squeeze milk out of a pound note. I’d like to see a dog-fight. If there’s a man-fight to-morrow, I’ll throttle Nookie-san, slide down into the stoke-hold, and see how this new brand of fighter shovels hell.”

“If you leave the woman behind,” Feeney grumbled, “I’ll go with you.”

“A man is an awful animal—when he’s fit as I am,” Finacune added. “The gang is certainly moonstruck to-night. Listen to that ungodly American sun-spotter sing.”

“There is an island fair, set in an eastern sea;

There is a maid keeping her tryst with me,

In the shade of the palm, with a lover’s delight,

Where it’s always the golden day or the silvery night—

... My star will be shining, love,
For you in the moonlight calm,
So be waiting for me by the eastern sea
In the shade of the shelt’ring palm.”

“That’s just the point—her star’ll be shining—only, it may not,” Finacune whispered.

Feeney disdained to answer. Presently Major Inuki appeared again and announced guilelessly:

“Gentlema’—my dear fren’s, our gen’ral express himself prepare to greet your illustrious peersonages—one and every one—in his quarters at once. Would you be deigned to follow my poor leadership?”

“Holy Father!—where’s my dress-suit?” Feeney asked with a start.

“Such an honor does not increase our chances for watching the next battle at close-range,” observed Finacune.

Nookie-san led them through the dust past innumerable battalions, until on a rising trail the sentries became as thick as fire-flies. After a twenty-minute walk they reached the summit of a commanding hill. At the entrance of a large tent paper-lanterns were hung, and below in the light Kuroki’s staff was gathered. Felicitations endured for several moments; then an inspired hush dominated all. The flap of the tent was drawn aside, and a small, gray-haired man of stars emerged stiffly. His eyes were bent toward the turf and thus he stood motionless beneath the lanterns for several seconds.

“General Kuroki,” spoke Inuki in a low voice.

The general raised his eyes for just an instant—great, tired, burning, black eyes with heavy rolled lids—bowed slightly, then backed into the tent.

“Now, there’s a man with no carnal lust in him,” Feeney commented to his companion. “He has commanded his wife and family not to write him from Japan, lest their letters distract attention from his work at hand.”

“And he drowned a thousand men crossing the Yalu,” remarked Finacune.

Bingley passed them with the remark, “I wonder if God has the dignity of Kuroki?”

Long afterward, when silence and stars lay upon the hills, there was still a low whispering in the tent of Feeney and Finacune.

“I wonder where the great frieze coat is this night?” came with a yawn from the old man.

“God knows,” Finacune replied. “Alone in the dark somewhere—unearthing great tales to be printed under a strange name. If any one finds them, it will be Dartmore, and his roots will wither because they are not in the Review. Or——” The little man halted suddenly. He had been about to add that a woman was apt to find them. Instead he said, “Alone in the dark somewhere, hiding from the wrath of the world—unless somebody’s hunted him down to tell him that he’s clean and desirable again.”

“I’d like to see the great frieze coat this night,” said Feeney in a listless tone, as if he had not listened to the other.

“I’d like to have been the one—to find him for her.”

“There never was a nobler thing done for a woman—than Routledge did,” the old man went on, after a pause.

“There never was a nobler woman,” breathed the florid one.

SEVENTEENTH CHAPTER
FEENEY AND FINACUNE ARE PRIVILEGED TO “READ THE FIERY GOSPEL WRIT IN BURNISHED ROWS OF STEEL”

As a matter of fact, Kuroki was only waiting for Oku and Nodzu to join him in the great concentration upon Liaoyang under Oyama. This battle was planned to finish the Russians in the field, as Togo was to do at sea, and Nogi in the Fortress. Roughly, the Japanese now stretched across the peninsula from the mouth of the Liao to the mouth of the Yalu—a quarter of a million men with eyes on Liaoyang—Kuroki on the right, Nodzu in the centre, Oku on the left. Oyama polished his boots and spurs in Tokyo, preparing to take his rice and tea in the field as soon as it was heated to the proper temperature.

Late in June, Kuroki awoke and began to spread like a gentle flow of lava, filling the hither defiles of the great Shanalin range, making ready to take the stiff and dreadful passes which the Russians had fortified as the outer protection of Liaoyang. Right here it must be interpolated that Bingley had cut Kuroki for Nodzu’s fourth army a few days before, when the two forces had touched wings for a day. The “Horse-killer” was scarcely gone before Kuroki encountered one of the toughest and pluckiest foes of his stupendous campaign, General Kellar, who gave him terrific fights at Fenshui and Motien passes, and tried to take them back after they were lost. Again at Yansu, a month later, the doughty Kellar disputed the last mountain-trail to the city, and Kuroki had to kill him to get through.... The army was growing accustomed to the civilians, and these were days of service for the correspondents. It was given them now to see the great fighting-machine of Kuroki—that huge bulk of flying power—lose its pomp and gloss and adjust itself to the field. It faded into the brown of the mountains, took on a vulpine leanness and a nerveless, soulless complacence, like nothing else in the world. Food was king; fighting was the big-game sport; toil was toil, and death was not the least of benefits. It was now August, and Kuroki’s part in the Liaoyang preliminaries finished. A month later the battle was on.... In the gray morning light of the twenty-ninth of August, the sound of distant batteries boomed over the Shanalin peaks to the ears of the correspondents. Finacune leaped up with a cry:

“Liaoyang is on! And what are we doing away off here?”

“Smokin’ our pipes in the mountings,” Feeney answered huskily, reaching for a match, “‘an’ breathin’ the mornin’ cool.’”

“We’re lost,” Finacune declared bitterly. “I can hear the London experts howling, ‘Where’s Kuroki and his lost army?’”

“Lost, is it? Hush! Come near me, young man. We’re lost, but destined to appear in good time,” Feeney whispered. “I’ll bet you an oyster-stew to a dill-pickle that we are the flankers. We’re relegated off here to cross the river when the moon’s right, and to bore in at the railroad behind the city, while Oyama and Kuropatkin are locking horns in front.”

Old Feeney, wise in war, had hit upon the strategy before the others; although any expert familiar with the terrain would thus have planned the taking of the city. That night Kuroki camped on the south side of the Taitse; and on the morning of the second day following was across with seventy thousand men. This by the grace of a corps of insignificant-looking engineers, busy little brown chaps who worked a miracle of pontooning—conquered a deep and rushing river without wetting a foot in Kuroki’s command. There had been rains, too, and between the showers, far salvos of cannon rode in from the west on the damp, jerky winds.

There is no place so good as here to drop a conventional figure of the Liaoyang field. The strategy of the battle is simple as a play in straight foot-ball. Japanese and Russian linesmen are engaged in a furious struggle south and southeast of the city. Imagine Kuroki, the Japanese half-back, breaking loose with the ball and dashing around the right end (crossing the Taitse River) and boring in behind toward the Russian goal—the railroad. This threatens the Russian communications. If the Russian full-back, Orloff, cannot defend the goal, the whole Russian line will be jerked up and out of the city to prevent being cut off from St. Petersburg. This leaves the field and the city to the Japanese. Here is the simplest possible straight line sketch of the city, river, railroad, and the position of the fighters when the battle began; also, shown by the arrow, the sweep of Kuroki’s now-famous end-run. [See drawing on next page.]

The midnight which ended August found the intrepid flanker launched straight at the Russian railroad at the point called the Yentai Collieries, nine miles behind the city.

“We’re locked tight in the Russian holdings this minute,” Finacune whispered, as he rode beside the grim veteran.

“Where did you think we were—on some church steps?” Feeney asked.

It looked a dark and dangerous game to the dapper little man. The lure of action, so strong at Home, often turns cold at the point of realization. Finacune had the nerves which are the curse of civilization, and he felt the chill white hand of fear creeping along these sensitive ganglia just now in the dark.

“I haven’t a thing against Kuropatkin—only I hope he is a fool for a night,” he observed presently. “Somehow, I don’t feel cheerful about the fool part. He must hear us tramping on his back door-steps this way. Why can’t he spare enough men from the city to come out here and sort of outflank the flanker?”

“That’s just his idea,” Feeney replied, “but don’t forget that Oyama will keep him so dam’ busy below that it will be hard for him to match us man for man and still hold on. However, remember he’s got the position, and he won’t need to match the Japanese—quite.”

As a matter of fact, Kuropatkin’s far-flung antennæ had followed Kuroki well. The Russian chief, knowing the strength of his front position on the city, had determined to slip back and crush Kuroki with an overwhelming force, leaving only two corps of Siberians, under Zurubaieff, to hold off Nodzu and Oku from the inner defenses of Liaoyang. General Orloff, who was in command at the Yentai Collieries, where Kuroki’s flanking point was aimed, was under orders to attack the Japanese in flank at the moment Kuropatkin’s main force appeared to hit the Japanese in full. There was the constant roar of big guns in Orloff’s ears in that dawning of September first—a rainy dawn. Also his own troops were moving along the railroad. Another thing, there had been a vodka-train broken into the night before by his own men.

Orloff thought he saw Kuropatkin coming, and set out prematurely. Kuroki was concealed in the fields of ripe millet, and turned to the work of slaughter with much enthusiasm, wondering at the weakness of the enemy. This slaughter of Orloff, which lost the battle for the Russians, Feeney and Finacune saw.

“There’s eighteen burnt matches in your coat pocket, my young friend,” said Feeney, “and your pipe would light better if you put some smokin’ in it—in the bowl, y’know. For what do you save the burnt matches?”

Finacune grinned shyly. “Wait till the fire starts—I’ll be warmer. I’m always like this at first—like the little boy who tried to cure bees with rheumatism.”

“Something’s wrong with the Russians,” Feeney declared in low excitement. “We should all be dead by this time—if they are going to whip Kuroki. Oh, war—war is a devil of a thing!” he added flippantly. “We’re crushing the farmers’ grain.”

“Shut up, you fire-eater. Haven’t you any reverence? I’m preparing myself for death.”

That instant they heard a low command from an unseen Japanese officer, and a long drawn trumpet-cry. The Japanese leaped up from the grain. All was a tangle. Feeney, grabbing Finacune’s arm, seized the moment to break from Major Inuki and the others, and rushed forward to the open with the infantry.

“Come on,” he said excitedly. “We’re foot-loose! Come on, my little angel brother, and play tag with these children!... ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers!’”

Never a wild rose of boyhood smelled half so sweet to Finacune as the ancient soil of Asia that moment, but he was whipped forward by certain emotions, to say nothing of Feeney and the avalanche of Japanese. They reached the edge of the grain and met the first gust of Orloff’s rifle steel. Down they went for the volleys, and that moment perceived a most amazing trick of a shell. A little knot of ten Japanese were running forward just before them when there was a sudden whistling shriek. The ten were lost for a second in a chariot of fire. When it cleared only one Japanese remained standing.

“That Russian gunner bowled a pretty spare,” grimly observed Feeney. “Come, get up, lad. The volleys are over.”

“Not this Finacune. I’m not short-sighted. I’m going to hold fast to this sweet piece of mainland just now. Besides——”

The little man burst into a nervous laugh and glanced at his foot. Then he stiffened into a sitting posture. Feeney looked him over. His hat was gone, scalp bleeding, his shirt-sleeve burst open as if it had been wet brown paper, and the sole of his left shoe torn away clean.

“Queer about that shrapnel,” he mumbled. “I’m interested in shrapnel anyway. I haven’t got any more toe-nails on that foot than a bee.”

Meanwhile, Kuroki was crushing the Orloff member with a force destined to wreck the whole Russian nervous-system. Out of the grain he poured torrents of infantry which smote the Russian column in a score of places at once.

“Did you ever put your ear to the ground during a battle, Feeney?” the other asked wistfully. “It sounds aw’fly funny—funnier than sea-shells. Let’s try.”

Feeney did not answer. He was watching the disorder which swept over the Russian lines. It had changed into a deluge tossing back toward the Collieries. There was a fury even in the clouds of powder smoke that seemingly had nothing to do with the winds. They darted, stretched, and tore apart from the whipped-line with some devilish volition of their own.

“There’ll be excitement presently,” the veteran remarked.

The other had risen and was clutching his arm, his bare foot lifted from the ground. He was properly stimulated by the action, but kept up a more or less incessant chattering, his brain working as if driven by cocaine.

“Ex—excitement! This is a sedative, I believe. Let’s lie down, you bald-headed fatalist——”

“Don’t dare to. Look at your foot. Dangerous below. Ricochets hug the turf.... Livin’ God! they’re going to throw out cavalry upon us! They’re going to heave cavalry against Kuroki’s point! Bloom up, little man. Here’s where the most nerveless of the white races smite the most nervous of the yellow—and on horses!”

“I’m bloomin’ on one foot,” said Finacune.

Kuropatkin, apprised of Orloff’s error, was thundering his divisions up the railroad at double-time toward the Collieries, but, despairing to reach the blundering Orloff in time, had ordered his cavalry railway-guards to charge the enemy.... They came on now with mediæval grandeur, a dream of chivalry, breaking through gaps of Orloff’s disordered infantry—to turn the point of the Japanese flanker. Splendid squadrons!... A curse dropped from Feeney’s gray lips.

“They’re going to murder the cavalry to put red blood into that rotten foot-outfit,” he said.

Finacune’s face was colorless. He did not answer. The sound of bullets in the air was like the winging of a plague of locusts. Often the two huddled together, allowing a gasping battalion to leap past them toward the front. Kuroki was breaking his command into fragments and rolling them forward like swells of the sea. His front-rankers dropped to their knees to fire; then dashed forward a little way to repeat—all with inhuman precision. Feeney’s field-glass brought out their work. In a mile-long dust-cloud, the Russian cavalry thundered forward like a tornado.

The Cossacks swept into Kuroki’s zone of fire. Feeney heard his companion breathe fast, and turned his head. The Word man was staring into the heart of the Cossack charge, his fears forgotten, fascinated unto madness. The earth roared with hoofs, and the air was rent with guns. On came the cavalry until it reached Kuroki’s point and halted it; but upon the Cossacks now from the countless Japanese skirmish-lines were hurled waves of flying metal—waves that dashed over the Russian horsemen as the sundered seas rushed together upon Pharaoh’s hosts.

“It’s like a biograph,” came from Finacune.

Kuroki was checked; his van ridden down. The Russian horse, cumbered with its dead, and taking an enfilading fire from half the Japanese command, was now ordered to retire. Only the skeletons of the glorious squadrons obeyed. Kuroki was stopped indeed—stopped to thrust an impediment aside. He rose from his knees, fastened a new point to his plow, and bored in toward the railway upon the strewn and trampled grain-fields. Already the hospital corps was gathering in the endless sheaves of wounded.

“One can tell the dead by the way they lie,” Finacune said vaguely. “They lie crosswise and spoil the symmetry.”

Orloff was steadied a trifle by the cavalry sacrifice, and turned an erratic but deadly fire upon the Japanese.... At this instant Major Inuki pounced upon the two correspondents and carried them back toward headquarters. He made very many monkey-sounds; was quite unintelligible from excitement; in fact, at the thought of these two being suffered to see so much alone. If their heads had been cameras, straightway would they have been smashed....

Practically they had seen it all. Kuroki’s work for that September day was done. Shortly after the retirement of the cavalry, he received a dispatch from Oyama saying that Kuropatkin had ordered a general retreat. Kuroki’s end-run had won the battle for Oyama; Orloff had lost it for Kuropatkin. The latter, perceiving the havoc at the Collieries when he came up with his big force, decided not to attack the victorious flanker. Instead, he set out for Mukden, and commanded Zurubaieff, the rear-guard, to pull up out of the city, cross the Taitse, and burn his bridges behind him.

“He’s quite a little ornament-merchant, this Kuroki,” Finacune observed that afternoon, holding a very sore foot in his hands.

“He’d put out hell—he’s too cold to burn,” replied Feeney.

EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER
BINGLEY BREAKS AWAY FROM THE CAMP OF THE CIVILIANS TO WATCH “THE LEAN-LOCKED RANKS GO ROARING DOWN TO DIE”

While Feeney and Finacune were flanking with Kuroki, the “Horse-killer” was with Nodzu, whose business it was to charge the Russian centre before Liaoyang. Bingley had not shifted commands without a good reason. He had made up his mind to get to an uncensored cable after the battle was over, and Nodzu was nearer the outlet of the war-zone. Moreover, it was said that the civilian contingent with Nodzu was not subjected to the smothering system, quite to the same extent as that with the flanker, Kuroki.

Nodzu, himself, did not appeal to Bingley. He seemed like a nice, polite little person of the sort the “Horse-killer” had observed serving behind curio-counters in Tokyo. His voice was light, and his beard wasn’t iron-gray. Bingley remarked that a marooned painter would have a hard time gathering a pastelle-brush from Nodzu’s beard, and he noted with contempt that the general spoke drawing-room Japanese to his staff. The generals whom Bingley respected, roared. They not only split infinitives, but they forked them with flame.

All three officers under Field-Marshal Oyama—Kuroki flanking on the right, Nodzu bearing in on the Russian centre, and Oku pushing up the railroad on the left—had to fight their way to the positions from which the three finally took the city. Many lesser towns and some very difficult passes were picked up on the way. For instance, Oku, the left blade of the crescent, who was being watched by the chief male figure in this narrative (as Bingley was watching Nodzu), changed the flags at Kaiping, Tashekao, and Newchwang on the way, Chinese towns of filth and fatness; and shoved before him in an indignant turkey-trot Generals Stackelberg and Zurubaieff.

Baking hot weather, and Liaoyang ahead! Nogi was thundering behind at the fortress of Port Arthur; Togo was a red demon in smoky crashing seas; blood of the Bear already smeared the Sun flag, and the blood-flower was in bloom in Manchuria.

Bingley felt the floods of hate stir and heat within him on the morning of August twenty-fourth, when over the hills from the right, which was eastward, sounded the Beginning—Kuroki in cannonade. Feeney and Finacune had had the luck to beat him to real action. The next day Oku took up the bombardment on the left. It was not until the following morn that Nodzu leaped to his guns, and the hot winds brought to the nostrils of the “Horse-killer” the pungent breath of powder.

The correspondents were held back in the smoke as usual. Five months in the field, and they had not yet caught up with the war. Again, on the second day of Nodzu’s action, the correspondents were left behind under a guard who was extremely courteous. This was more than white flesh could bear. The civilians implored, demanded. It was remarkable that Bingley did not mix strongly in this rebellion. He was planning carefully, desperately, to be in at the end, and showed the courage to wait. He realized that the battle was far from ended yet; even though Kuroki was mixing hand-to-hand in the east, Oku in the west closing in over barriers of blood, and Nodzu in the centre engaged daily with a ten-mile front of duelists—a bare-handed, hot-throated fiend, chucking his dead behind him for elbow-room.

Bingley studied maps and strategy—not from Nodzu’s standpoint alone, but from the whole. What would he do if he were Field-Marshal Oyama?

The theatre of war was dark on the morning of August twenty-ninth, but in mid-afternoon Nodzu began firing—firing at nothing! He stood still and belched thunder, as if it were something to be rid of; ripping open the very kernels of sound, and making the summer afternoon no fit place for butterflies. Bingley’s eyes were very bright. This tallied with one of his hypotheses. It was a demonstration, under the cover of which his old friend Kuroki was to start a flanking movement.

That night the smileless young giant worked long in his tent. Stretched full-length upon his blankets, a lantern by his side, he wrote hard in his note-books and drew maps of the flying flanker, whom Feeney and Finacune were now following. He showed these maps, all dated to the hour, in London afterward, with the remark that he had divined the strategy of Liaoyang before the battle.

He glanced at his watch, at last, and at his field outfit, which was all packed and in order. Then he slept until dawn. No one slept after that, since Nodzu was up with the first light, like a boy with a new cannon on the morning of the Fourth. Bingley was missed at breakfast. His Korean coolies knew nothing, except that they had been ordered to take care of the Bingley property and wait for orders. The “Horse-killer” had made a clean departure with a good mount and nothing but his saddle-bags. Still, no one fathomed his audacity. Confidently, it was expected that he would be returned in short order by some of the Japanese commanders who happened to read the civilian insignia flaring upon his sleeve. As a matter of fact, Bingley quickly would have been overhauled had he not brooded so long and so well upon the time. The middle Japanese army was too busy that morning to think of one daring civilian.

Bingley’s plan was this: To watch what he could of the battle, unfettered, making his way gradually westward behind Oku until the end, or until such time as he mastered the color and saw the end; then to ride alone down the railroad, nearly to Fengmarong; there to leave his horse, cross the Liao River, and travel on foot down to Wangcheng. He planned to catch the Chinese Eastern at Wangcheng and make the day’s journey to Shanhaikwan beyond the Wall, where the Japanese could not censor his message. In a word, Bingley’s plan was to stake all on reaching a free cable before any other man, and to put on that cable the first and greatest story of the greatest battle of the war.

That was a day in which Bingley truly lived. A mile behind Nodzu’s reserve, he spurred his horse down into a tight darkened ravine, and tethered the beast long to crop the pale grass blades thinly scattered throughout the sunless crevasse. Marking well the topography of the place, so that he could find it again in anything but darkness, Bingley moved back toward the valleys of action. Nodzu was hammering the impregnable Russian position before the city from the hills, and charging down at intervals great masses of infantry to hold the main Russian force in their intrenchments before the city, and thus to prevent the Russian general from sending back a large enough portion of his army to crush or outflank the Japanese flanker.

Noon found Bingley still at large and across a big valley, now almost empty of troops. He was forced to cross one more ridge to command the battle-picture. This required a further hour, and he sat down to rest upon the shoulder of a lofty, thickly timbered hill which overlooked the city for which the nations met—a huge, sprawled Chinese town, lost for moments at a time in the smoke-fog. The river behind was obscured entirely; still, the placing of the whole battle array was cleared to him in a moment. All his mapping and brooding had helped him marvelously to this quick grasp of the field. He wished that he could cable the picture of the city, the river, the railroad, the hills, just as he saw them now—so that London might also see through Bingley eyes. As for the rest—Nodzu’s great thundering guns and his phantom armies moving below in the white powder-reek—he could write that....

“But I’ve got to get a strip of real action—I’ve got to see the little beasts go,” he muttered at length. “It’s a long chance, but I’ve got to get a touch of the blood-end—to do it right. It is as necessary as the lay of the land.”

And down he went, forgetting fear and passing time, even during certain moments, forgetting the outer world that would cry, “Bingley! Bingley!” when he was through.... Deeper and deeper he sank into the white mist of smoke which five minutes before had been torn by flame and riven with rifle crashes.

It was a moment of lull between Nodzu’s infantry charges. A land current of air cleared the low distance. The southern line of intrenched Russian infantry looked less than a mile away. Behind them, the land was pitted and upheaved with defenses to the very wall of the city, having the look, as Bingley observed, as the wind swiftly cleared away the smoke, of the skin of a small-pox convalescent. There was no sign of life in the Russian works, but his quick eye marked that shrapnel was emplaced on the higher mounds.... Had he lived a thousand years for the single purpose of viewing a battle—hundreds of acres of embattled thousands straining in unbridled devilment; a valley soaked and strewn with life essences, yet swarming with more raw material for murder—he could not have judged his advent better. It was the thirtieth of August—the day that Nodzu and Oku began their un-Christly sacrifices to hold Kuropatkin in the city and in front, while Kuroki flanked.

Suddenly—it was like a tornado, prairie fire, and stampede rolled into one—Nodzu of the pastelle-brush beard called up his swarm from thicket, hummock, gulley, ditch, from the very earth, and launched it forward against the first blank ridge of the Russians. This brown cyclone tore over Bingley of the Thames and across the ruffled valley. The “Horse-killer” sat in awe. There was not yet a shot. The Russian trenches had the look of desertion.

“Hell!” he snapped viciously. “Those trenches are abandoned. Kuropatkin might as well be cooling his toes in Lake Baikal for all Nodzu will find there, and he’s rushing as if——”

At this instant the Russian works were rubbed out of vision in a burst of white smoke, and the sound of Russian bullets was like the swooping of ten thousand night-hawks.... A terrific crash, a blast of dust, burnt powder, filings, sickening gases—and that which a moment ago was a dashing young captain with upraised sword was now wet rags and dripping fragments of pulp.

“Shrapnel,” said Bingley. “He’s happy now. He was playing to a gallery of Samurai saints—that little officer.... Nervy devils all—never doubt it.... But we’re walloped—walloped sure as hell. We can never take those works.”

The position of the enemy was now obscured by trembling terraces of white smoke, out of which poured countless streams of death, literally spraying Nodzu’s command, as firemen play their torrents upon a burning building. A rat couldn’t have lived out a full minute in the base of that valley. The Japanese left a terrible tribute, but the few sped on and upward to the first line of Russian entrenchments. A peculiar memory recurred to Bingley. Once in London he had seen a runaway team of huge grays attached to a loaded coal-cart. The tailboard of the cart jarred loose, and the contents streamed out behind as the horses ran. So the hard-hit streamed out from the Japanese charge as it passed over the base of the valley.

Even as the maddest of the Japanese survivors were about to flood over the first embankment, it was fringed with bayonets as a wall with broken glass; and along the length of the next higher trenches shot a ragged ring of smoke—clots of white strung like pearls.... As a train boring into a mountain is stopped, so was Nodzu’s brown swarm halted, lifted, and hurled back.

“The little brown dogs!” observed Bingley with joyful amazement. “Why, they’d keep the British army busy!... And they smile, dam’ ’em—they smile!”

This last referred to the dead and wounded which the hospital corps was now bringing back.... From out of the welter, a new charge formed and failed. Again—even Bingley was shaken by the slaughter and his organs stuck together—Nodzu hurled a third torrent of the Samurai up that unconquerable roll of earth. It curled like a feather in a flame, diminished, and faltered back....

The day was ending—Bingley’s gorgeous, memorable day. He had travelled twenty-five miles on foot; he had caught up with the Japanese army after five months in the field; he had seen Nodzu charge and Zurubaieff hold; he had seen the wounded who would not cry, and the dead who would not frown.

The whole was a veritable disease in his veins. The day had burned, devoured him. He was tired enough to sleep in a tree, chilled from spent energy; so hungry that he could have eaten horn or hoof; but over all he was mastered by the thought of Bingley and his work—the free cable, the story, the Thames, the battle, Bingley, the first and greatest story, acclaim of the world, the world by the horns! So his brain ran, and far back in his brain the films of carnage were sorted, filed, and labelled—living, wounded, dead; the voices of the Japanese as they ran, Russian-pits from which death spread, shrapnel emplacements which exploded hell; barbed entanglements spitting the Japanese for leisure-slaying, as the butcher-bird hangs up its living meat to keep it fresh for the hunger-time; the long, quick-moving, burnished guns that caught the sun, when the smoke cleared, and reflected it like a burning-glass—such were the details of the hideous panorama in Bingley’s brain.

The chief of his troubles was that Liaoyang still held. He had always laughed at the Russians, and looked forward to the time when he should watch the British beat them back forever from India. The valor of the stolid, ox-like holding angered him now. Suppose Liaoyang should not be taken! It would spoil his story and hold him in the field longer than he cared to stay. He had but scant provisions for two days. He planned to be off for the free cable to-morrow night.

“It’s going to rain,” he gasped, as he let himself down at nightfall into his ravine. He heard the nicker of the horse below. It did not come to him with any spirit of welcome, for Bingley was sufficient unto himself, but with the thought that he must keep the beast alive for the race to the cable after the battle.

“Yes, it’s going to rain,” he repeated. “You can count on rain after artillery like to-day.... Living God! I thought I knew war before, but it was all sparrow-squabbling until to-day!”

He found his saddle-bags safely in the cache where he had left them—this with a gulp of joy, for the little food he had was in them. Crackers, sardines, a drink of brandy that set his empty organism to drumming like a partridge. It also whetted his appetite to a paring edge, but he spared his ration and smoked his hunger away. Then in the last drab of day, and in the rain, he cut grasses and branches, piling them within the reach of his horse. A stream of water began to trickle presently down the rocks when the shower broke. Bingley drank deeply, and caught many ponchos full afterward for his mount. Later he fell asleep, shivering, and dreamed that the devil was lashing the world’s people—a nation at a time—into pits of incandescence. The savagery of the dream aroused him, and he became conscious of a strangeness in his ears. It was the silence, and it pained like rarefied air. Wet, stiffened, deathly cold, he fell asleep again.

The next day, the thirty-first, and the worst of the battle, Bingley curved about Oku’s rear to the railroad which marked for him a short cut to the outer world. Another, that day, watched Oku closely as he forced the Russian right wing to face the Japanese, but Bingley, even from a distance, was charged and maddened by the dynamics of the action....

Late in the afternoon, a little to the west of the railway, he stopped to finish his food and gather forage for his horse, when over the crest of a low hill appeared a tall human figure. The Japanese put no such giants in the field, and Bingley was startled by a certain familiarity of movement.

The man approached, a white man. Chill, weakness, and hatred welled suddenly in Bingley’s veins. He was not alone on the road to a free cable. The man he feared most in the world was entered in the race with him—the man he had seen last at the Army and Navy reception, and roughed and insulted, nearly three years before.

Routledge smiled, but spoke no word. Bingley regarded the strong, strange profile, haggard, darkened as a storm arena. He saddled savagely and rode after the other. It was fifty-five miles to Wangcheng, where he meant to catch the Chinese Eastern for Shanhaikwan to-morrow morning—fifty-five miles in the dark, over rain-softened roads.

“Hell! he can’t make it on foot,” Bingley muttered. “I’ll beat him to the train.”

And yet he was angered and irritated with the reflection that the man ahead had never yet been beaten.

NINETEENTH CHAPTER
NOREEN CARDINEGH, ENTERING A JAPANESE HOUSE AT EVENTIDE, IS CONFRONTED BY THE VISIBLE THOUGHT-FORM OF HER LOVER

Noreen Cardinegh buried her father alone. At least, those besides herself who took any part in the last service for the famous correspondent were only Japanese hired for the manual labor. To the English who were still at the hotel, eager to assist the woman, and charged to do so by Feeney, Finacune, and Trollope before they left, the morning was sensational. In spite of the fact that scarcely any one had been admitted to the Cardinegh room for the past two days, Talliaferro and others had arranged for the funeral. They were abroad at nine o’clock in the morning, and found the formality over.... The Japanese clerk told them all. At her request, he had made arrangements with a Tokyo director of such affairs. The body had been taken out at dawn. Miss Cardinegh had followed in her rickshaw. A place had been secured in the Kameido gardens—very beautiful now in the cloud of cherry blossoms. She had preferred a Buddhist to a Shinto priest; refusing the services of an American or English missionary. The clerk explained that he was permitted to tell these things now.... Possibly Miss Cardinegh would see one or two of her friends at this time.... Yes, she was in her room.

“Come,” she said in a low trailing tone, in response to Talliaferro’s knock.

Noreen was sitting by the window. The big room had been put in order. The morning was very still. The woman was dry-eyed, but white as a flower. She held out her hand to Talliaferro and tried to smile.... Strangely, he thought of her that moment as one of the queens of the elder drama—a queen of stirring destiny, whose personal history was all interpenetrated with national life, and whom some pretender had caused to be imprisoned in a tower. This was like Talliaferro.

“We were all ready and so eager to help you, Miss Cardinegh,” he began. “You know, some of the older of the British correspondents have dared to feel a proprietary interest in all that concerns you. Why did you disappoint us so?”

“I did not want anything done for him—that would be done on my account,” she said slowly. “It was mine to do—as his heritage is mine. I only ask you to think—not that anything can extenuate—but I want you to think that it was not my father, but his madness.”

“We all understand that—even those who do not understand all that happened.”

“The tragedy is the same.... Ah, God, how I wish all the fruits might be mine—not Japan’s, not Russia’s!”

He started to speak, to uproot from her mind this crippling conception, but she raised her hand.

“You cannot make me see it differently, Mr. Talliaferro,” she said tensely. “I have had much time to think—to see it all! You are very good—all of you. One thing, I pray you will do for me.”

“You have but to speak it, Miss Cardinegh.”

“When you take the field—all of you, wherever you go—watch and listen for any word of Mr. Routledge.... He may be the last to hear that he is vindicated. Follow any clue to find him. Tell him the truth—tell him to come to me!”

Peter Pellen’s “Excalibur” accepted the mission, declaring that he would faithfully impress it upon the others with the second army, shortly to leave; as Feeney and Finacune certainly would do with the first. And so he left her, one of the coldest and dryest men out of London; and yet, just now, he carried himself under a stiff curb, lest he forget his war....

“And that’s the end of the man who lowered the fluids in the British barometer, like a typhoon in the China Sea,” he observed in solitude. “And the Japanese buried him in the Kameido, in cherry-blossom time—buried him for money—the man who opened the veins of their Empire!”

The work all done, Noreen Cardinegh met the deluge. The elements had been forming for three days. She had sensed them vaguely in sudden shivers of dread. Her soul was bared now to the primal terror, the psychic terror, of the outcast, against which seasoned valor quails.... By the window, she sat dry-eyed, in the midst of her father’s possessions! From the street, over the hotel-gardens, came to her ears the screaming of children. Japanese schoolboys were passing, a procession of them. They were playing soldier—marching very erect and proudly, with sticks for guns.

“My father did this!”... Upon such a sentence the whole dreadful structure was built. Thoughts of her childhood had their significance in the breaking of this horrid storm of war. Aye, and the little house in Tyrone before her coming! It was there that the black shadow, falling upon his country, crept into the brain of Jerry Cardinegh. The shadow grew, was identified with her earliest memories. Into her father’s mortal wound, inflicted by the passing of the sweetest woman, the shadow had sunk with all its Tartarean blackness. She saw it all now—the sinister, mysterious passion which had rivalled even his love for her. The wars had deepened, blackened it. The last visit to Ireland had turned it into hideous, tossing night. And this was the beating storm—babes with sticks for guns, companies of soldiers in the Fukiage, the wailing “Banzai Niphon” from Shimbashi station, where the regiments entrained for the southern ports of mobilization; and on the lower floor of the hotel, where still were gathering the war-experts from all the earth.... The strength ran from her limbs, and her heart cried out.

Japan, which she had loved, became like a haunted house to her; yet she could not hope to find Routledge without some word concerning him, and Tokyo was the natural base of her search operations. All the correspondents going out with the different armies were pledged to communicate with her any word they might receive regarding him. The correspondents, unsecured to any of the four armies, and destined to work from the outside—at Chifu, Newchwang, Chemulpo, Shanhaikwan or Shanghai—even these had promised her a cable-flash at the sight of Routledge. Through an agent in New York she learned that the name “Routledge” was not attached for work in the Orient to any newspaper on the Atlantic seaboard; still, by cable she subscribed for the chief American newspapers. Tokyo was her address.

She could not stay longer at the Imperial, which had become a sort of civilian war headquarters. All was war in its corridors. In the Minimasacuma-cho of the Shiba district, she took a small house, establishing herself in the native style, but she could not escape the agony. Japan was burning with war-lust from end to end; whetted of tooth, talon-fingered, blood-mad. Her fighting force, one of the most formidable masses that ever formed on the planet’s curve, was landing in Korea and Liaotung. What meant the battle of the Yalu to her; the tragedy of the Petropavlovsk, sunk off the tip of the fortress with Makaroff, the great Verestchagin, and five hundred officers and men? Not a distant calamity of foreign powers, but Tyrone—Shubar Khan—Cardinegh—madness—treachery. What meant the constant tension of Tokyo, singing in her ears like wires stretched tight—like the high-pitched, blood-hungry song of insects in the night? It meant the work of her own blood, her own accursed heritage.... She was called to the Imperial often for the mails, but she avoided the Englishmen there, and admitted none to the little house in Shiba. Always, when there were white men about, she fancied a whispering behind her; as, indeed, there was—the whispers that are incited by the passing of an exquisite woman.

In the early days following her father’s death, Noreen was besieged by men who appeared suddenly, quietly—men unknown in Japan—who demanded with seeming authority all the documents in her father’s effects which pertained to the treachery in India. These were agents of the great British secret service—men of mystery to all save those who threatened England’s inner wall. Noreen gave all that they asked, convinced them of her sincerity. They impressed upon her the needs of utter secrecy, and assured her that the name of Routledge was being purified to the farthest ends of the service. It was intimated, however, that this would require much time; as, indeed, it had to fix the crime upon him. These men worked but little with cables and mails.

So the wire-ends held her to Tokyo through Yalu and Nanshan to the middle of June. She was returning from the Imperial at early evening with a bundle of American newspapers. She knew by the hushed streets that another battle was in progress; and she felt with the people the dreadful tension of waiting, as she hurried swiftly along the wide, dirt-paved Shiba road. Tokyo was all awake and ominously still. A rickshaw-coolie darted out from a dark corner with his cart, and accosted her in a low, persistent way. He wheeled his cart in front of her, as he would not have dared with a native or a male foreigner—and all in a silent, alien fashion. She could not sit still to ride—pushed the rickshaw aside and sped on in the dusk. She was ill, her throat parched with waiting, her face white with waiting. The founts of her life were dry, her heart thralled with famine. Where was he for this new battle?... She passed knots of women in the streets. They talked softly as she passed and laughed at her, held up their boy-babes and laughed. She knew something of the language, and caught their whispering—the laughing, child-like women of Japan, in whom transient foreigners delight. They breathed world-conquest into the ears of their men-children; and were more horrible far in their whispering and laughing, to Noreen now, than tigresses yammering in the jungle-dark.

She faltered before the door of her house, afraid. The servants had not yet lighted the lamps, and within it was darker than the street.... There, among the densest shadows, he sat—there, by the covered easel in a low chair. He was smiling at her, a white and a weary smile. His long, thin hands were locked above his head; his lean limbs stretched out in tired fashion, the puttee leggings worn dull from the saddle fenders; his chest gaunt, the leather-belt pulled tight.

Noreen sank to her knees before the empty chair, her face, her arms, in the seat where the mist of a man had been!... How long she remained there she never knew; but it was some time before light when she was aroused by a far, faint roar beating toward her, across the city. The roar quickened, broke into a great, throbbing, coherent shout, and swept by like a hurricane, leaving a city awake and thrown wide open to exultation. The battle of Telissu had been won. Only defeats are mourned in Japan, not the slain of a victory. Dawn broke, and Noreen looked out on an altered Tokyo—loathsome to her as a gorging reptile.

“You are intensely psychic, Miss Cardinegh,” the English doctor said. “This ‘vision,’ as you call it, means nothing in itself—that is, so far as concerns the man you say you saw—but it signifies that you are on the verge of a nervous break-down. You must cease all worry and work, eat plenty of meat, and take long walks. It’s all nerves, just nerves.”

“No, it does not mean that your lover is dead,” said Asia, through the lips of the old Buddhist priest who had buried her father. “Such things happen this way. He may have been sleeping, dreaming of you, when the strength of your heart’s desire rose to the point of calling his form-body to your house for an instant. It might have happened before in the daylight, and you did not know—save that you felt restless possibly, and filled with strange anguish. Had there been light, you would not have seen him.”

“But,” she faltered, “I have heard at the moment of death—such things happen——”

“Yes, but he did not need to die to be called to you.”

Yet she was deathly afraid. It had been the same after the night of her dream in Cheer Street—the night that Routledge had slipped from a noose in Madras. If Noreen had known that!... It is well that she did not, for she could have borne but little more.

Further weeks ground by. Only in the sense that she did not die, Noreen lived, moving about her little house, in daylight and lamp-light, without words, but with many fears. She tried to paint a little in those wonderful summer days—days of flashing light, and nights all lit with divinity—but between her eyes and the canvas, films of memory forever swung: Routledge-san in Cheer Street; in the golden stillness of the Seville; the little Paris studio; in the carriage from Bookstalls to Charing Cross; in the snowy twilight on the Bund in Shanghai—yes, and the mist of the man here by the easel!... Always he was with her, in her heart and in her mind.

Not a word concerning Routledge, from the least or greatest of the men who had promised to watch for him! Often it came to her now that he had either allied himself with the Russians or avoided the war entirely. Could it be that he had already followed the prophecy which Mr. Jasper had repeated for her, and gone to join Rawder a last time in the Leper Valley?... No one in Japan had ever heard of the Leper Valley.

There was little mercy in the thought of him being with the Russians; and yet such a service might have appealed to a man who desired to remain apart from the English. If he were in Liaoyang or Mukden, there was no hope of reaching him, until winter closed the campaign, at least. Only a few hundred miles away, as the crow flies, and yet Mukden and Liaoyang could be approached only from around the world. The valley between two armies is impassable, indeed—unwired, untracked, and watched so that a beetle cannot cross unseen.... The general receives a dispatch at dawn containing the probable movements of the enemy for this day. One of his spies in the hostile camp which faces him, less than two miles away, has secured the information and sent it in—not across the impassable valley, but around the world.... If Routledge had known that the curse had been lifted from him, would he not have rushed back to her? It seemed so, but with the Russians, he would have been last to learn what had befallen.

Just once—and it marked the blackest hour of that black summer in Japan—the thought flooded upon her that Routledge knew, but purposely remained apart; that he was big enough to make the great sacrifice for her, but not to return to the woman whose heritage, in turn, was the Hate of London. That hour became a life-long memory, even though the thought was whipped and shamed and beaten away.

It was late in July when certain sentences in an American newspaper rose with a thrilling welcome to her eyes. There was an intimate familiarity, even in the heading, which he might not have written, but which reflected the movement and color of his work. It was in the World-News of New York, and signed “A. V. Weed.”... A rather long feature cable dated at Chifu shortly after the battle of Nanshan. A number of Russian prisoners had been taken by the Japanese, and with them was a certain Major Volbars, said to be the premier swordsman of the Russian Empire. The Japanese heard of his fame; and, as it appears, became at once eager to learn if Russian civilization produced sword-arms equal to those of her own Samurai. The prisoner was asked to meet one Watanabe, a young infantry captain, and of that meeting the World-News published the following:

... Here was armistice, the nucleus of which was combat. There was a smile upon the face of Watanabe, a snarling smile, for his lips were drawn back, showing irregular teeth, glistening white. His low brow was wrinkled and his close-cropped, bristling hair looked dead-black in the vivid noon. The hilt of his slim blade was polished like lacquer from the nimble hands of his Samurai fathers. This was Watanabe of Satsuma, whose wrist was a dynamo and whose thrusts were sparks. The devil looked out from his fighting-face.

Volbars compelled admiration—a conscienceless man, from his eyes, but courageous. He was small, heavy-shouldered, and quick of movement, with nervous eyes and hands. His left cheek was slashed with many scars, and his head inclined slightly to the right, through a certain muscular contraction of the neck or shoulder. This master of the archaic art had the love of his soldiers.

“In the name of God, let him take the attack, Major!” Volbars’ second whispered. “His style may disconcert you.”

The Russian waved the man away, and faced the Japanese swordsman. His head seemed to lie upon his right shoulder, and his cruel, sun-darkened face shone with joy. His thick, gleaming white arm was bare. His blade, which had opened the veins of a half-hundred Europeans, screamed like a witch as the master-hand tried it in thin air.

The weapons touched. The styles of the antagonists were different, but genius met genius on its own high ground. Each blade was a quiver of arrows, each instant of survival due to devilish cunning or the grace of God. In spite of his warning, Volbars took the attack and forced it tigerishly. Some demon purpose was in his brain, for he shot his volleys high. A marvelous minute passed, and a fountain of crimson welled from Watanabe, where his neck and shoulder met. The heavy breathing of the Russian was heard now back among his fellow prisoners. The Japanese, sheeted with blood from his wound, defended himself silently. He was younger, lighter, superbly conditioned.

The face of Volbars changed hideously. Sweat ran into his eyes, where the desperation of fatigue was plain. His lips were stiff white cords. Patches of grayish white shone in his cheeks and temples.... For a second his shoulders lifted; then an exultant gasp was heard from his dry throat.

That which had been the left eye in the face of Watanabe burst like a bubble and ran down. Yet not for the fraction of a second did the Japanese lose his guard. Though a window of his throne-room was broken, the kingdom of his courage still endured. The Russian second heard his man gasp, “I’m spent. I can’t kill him!”

The grin upon the awful face of the One-eyed became more tense. He seized the aggressive, and the Japanese lines greeted the change with a high-strung, ripping shout. Watanabe bored in, stabbing like a viper, his head twisted to spare his dark side. Volbars’ limbs were stricken of power. He saw the end, as he was backed toward the prisoners. A tuft of grass unsteadied him for a second—and the Japanese lightning struck.

The sword of the Russian quivered to the earth and the master fell upon it, his face against the ground, his naked sword-arm shaking, the hand groping blindly for the faithless hilt. Watanabe bowed to the prisoners, and walked unassisted back to his own roaring lines. His seconds followed closely, one of them wiping the sword of the Samurai with a wisp of grass.... It appears that Volbars had the audacity to attempt to blind his opponent before killing him. It was like the battle of the Yalu. Volbars, as did General Zassulitch, looked too lightly on the foe....

“A. V. Weed”—what blessings fell upon the name that moment!... He was not with the Russians! Not in the Leper Valley! A cable to the World-News that night brought a reply the next day, to the effect that “A. V. Weed” had never been in touch with the office; that he was the freest of free lances, and brought his messages from time to time to one of the free cables outside the war-zone.... The free cable nearest to Liaoyang—already granted to be the next scene of conflict—was at Shanhaikwan, at the end of the Great Wall. Noreen arranged for mail and dispatches to follow her, and went down the Tokaido, overtaking at Nagasaki a ship which had sailed from Yokohama three days before she left.

TWENTIETH CHAPTER
ROUTLEDGE IS SEEN BY NOREEN CARDINEGH, BUT AT AN EXCITING MOMENT IN WHICH SHE DARE NOT CALL HIS NAME

Noreen breathed sweeter with the shores of Japan behind. The Pacific liner, Manchu, was crossing the Yellow Sea for Shanghai. An evening in early August, and the tropic breeze came over the moon-flecked water, from the spicy archipelagoes below. It was late, and she was sitting alone, forward on the promenade-deck. The thought thralled, possessed her completely, that she was drawing nearer, nearer her soul’s mate. Might it not be given to her to keep the covenant—to find him, though all others had failed?... There was a high light over Asia for her inner eye, this memorable night of her romance. The crush of Japan was gone, and in the great hour of emancipation her love for Routledge, hardiest of perennials, burst into a delicate glory of blossoming—countless blooms of devotion, pure white; and in all honor she could not deny—rare fragrant flowerings of passional crimson....

At Shanghai she sought the office of the North China News, to learn what the war had done during her three days at sea. The Japanese armies were panting—inside the passes which had recently protected Liaoyang. Any day might begin the battle with which Japan intended forever to end Russia’s hold in Liaotung peninsula. The News stated blithely that there was no doubt of the war being over by September.... There was another story in the files of early August, and in the silent office the woman bent long over the sheet, huge as a luncheon-cover. This was an Indian exchange with a Simla mark. An English correspondent, wandering somewhere in the Hills, had run across a white man travelling with an old Hindu lama. A weird mad pair, the story said, half-starving, but they asked no alms. Whither they were going, they would not say, nor from whence they had come. The natives seemed to understand the wanderers, and possibly filled the lama’s bowl. The feet of the white man were bare and travel-bruised, his clothing a motley of Hindu and Chinese garments. The article intimated that he was a “gone-wrong missionary,” but its whole purport and excuse was to point out the menace to British India from unattached white men, mad or apparently mad, moving where they willed, in and out of restless States, especially at such a time as now, when the activity of foreign agents, etc., etc....

The article was rock-tight and bitter with the Dead Sea bitterness. The pressure of the whole senile East was in it. The woman quivered from a pain the prints had given her, and moved out of the darkened office into the strange road, thick and yellow with heat.... Could this be Rawder and his Hindu master?... It occurred to her suddenly that the men of the newspaper might be able to tell her of the Leper Valley. She turned back to the office, was admitted to the editor.... No, he had not heard of the Leper Valley. There were leper colonies scattered variously throughout the interior. It might be one of them.... She thanked him and went away, leaving a problem to mystify many sleepy, sultry days.... That night, Noreen engaged passage in a coasting steamer for Tongu, and on the morning of the third day thereafter boarded the Peking-Shanhaikwan train on the Chinese Eastern.

Alone in a first-class compartment, she watched the snaky furrows of maize throughout seven eternities of daylight, until her eyes stung and her brain revolted at the desolate, fenceless levels of sun-deadened brown. Out of a pent and restless doze, at last she found that a twilight film had cooled the distance; she beheld the sea on her right hand, and before her the Great Wall—that gray welt on the Eastern world, conceived centuries before the Christ, rising into the dim mountains and jutting down into the sea. In an inexplicable moment of mental abstraction, as the train drew up to Shanhaikwan, the soul of the weary woman whispered to her that she had seen it all before.

At the Rest House, Noreen ventured to inquire of a certain agent of a big British trading company if he knew any of the English or American war-correspondents who had come recently to Shanhaikwan to file their work on the uncensored cable. This man was an unlovely Englishman poisoned by China and drink.... Oh, yes, some of the men had come in from the field or from Wangcheng with big stories, but had trouble getting back to their lines, it was said.

“Have you heard—or do you know—if Mr. Routledge has been here?”

His face filled with an added inflammation, and he mumbled something which had to do with Routledge and the treachery in India.

“Do you mean to say,” she demanded hopelessly, “that you—that Shanhaikwan has not heard that Mr. Routledge had nothing to do with the treachery in India—that another, Cardinegh of the Witness, confessed the crime on his death-bed?”

The Englishman had not heard. He bent toward her with a quick, aroused look and wanted to know all, but she fled to her room.... It was not strange if Routledge failed to hear of his vindication, when this British agent had not.... By the open window she sat for hours staring at the Great Wall in the moonlight. She saw it climb through the white sheen which lay upon the mountains, and saw it dip into the twinkling sea, like a monster that has crawled down to drink. There were intervals when Shanhaikwan was still as the depths of the ocean. The whole landscape frightened her with its intimate reality. The thought came again that this had once been her country, that she had seen the Mongol builders murdered by the lash and the toil.

The purest substance of tragedy evolved in her brain. There had been something abhorrent in contact with the Englishman below. She had seen a hate for Routledge like that before—at the Army and Navy reception! And then, the sinister narrative of the white man in India, as it had been set down by the English correspondent!... Could this be “their bravest man”? Was he, too, attracting hatred and suspicion in India, as a result of the excitement into which her father’s work had thrown the English? Could not poor Rawder, barefoot, travel-bruised, and wearing a motley of native garments, be free from this world-havoc which was her heritage?... That instant in the supremacy of pain she could not feel in her heart that Routledge wanted her—or that he was in the world!... Could he be dead, or in the Leper Valley? Had his mind gone back to dust—burned out by these terrible currents of hatred?...

The pictured thought drew forth a stifled scream. The lamp in her room was turned low, and the still, windless night was a pitiless oppression. Crossing the room to open the door, in agony for air, she passed the mirror and saw a dim reflection—white arms, white throat, white face. She turned the knob.

The clink of glasses on a tin-tray reached her from below, with the soft tread of a native servant; then from farther, the clink of billiard-balls and a man’s voice, low but insinuating, its very repression an added vileness:

“Dam’ me, but she was a stunning woman, a ripping woman—and out after——”

She crashed the door shut and bolted it against the pestilence.... Had the powers of evil this night consummated a heinous mockery to test her soul, because her soul was strong?... In terror and agony, she knelt by the open window. The Wall was still there, sleeping in the moonlight—the biggest man-made thing in the world, and the quietest. It steadied her, and the stuff of martyrs came back.

The man in charge of the cable-office in Shanhaikwan told her the next morning that a correspondent who signed himself “A. V. Weed” had brought in a long message for New York, just after the Yalu battle, but had not tarried even a night in town. “A tall, haggard stranger with a low voice,” the man described him.... There was little more to be learned, but this was life to her, and the first tangible word, that he lived, since her father’s death. Noreen spent the day walking alone on the beaches and through the foreign concession.

From the top of the Wall in the afternoon, she stared down at the little walled city which grew out of the great masonry. There she could see a bit of living China—all its drones and workers and sections and galleries, as in a glass bee-hive. Big thoughts took the breath from her. Europe seemed young and tawdry beside this. She picked up one of the loose stones—touched the hem of the Wall’s garment, as it were—and again she had but to close her eyes and look back centuries into the youth of time, when the Wall was building, to see the Mongols swarming like ants over the raw, half-done thing.... There was a little French garrison in the town; and the Sikh infantry, at target-practice on the beach, brought India back. The day was not without fascination to her relieved mind.

The evening train from Peking brought a white man who added to the stability of Shanhaikwan—Talliaferro of the Commonwealth. The dry little man was greatly disturbed in heart. He had deliberately given up his place with Oku’s second army, choosing to miss the smoky back-thresh of future actions in the field, in order to get what he could out on the free cable. Peter Pellen’s “Excalibur,” credited with acumen, flying and submarine, had broken under the Japanese pressure.

“Have you seen or heard of Mr. Routledge?” she whispered at dinner.

“No,” he replied. “In the field we never got a whisper from him. The Pan-Anglo man in Shanghai told me, however, that he thought Routledge was playing the Chinese end—that is, living just outside the war-zone and making sallies in, from time to time, when things are piping hot. The reason he thought Routledge was working this game was the fact that New York has sprung three or four great stories which London has missed entirely. It’s all a guess, Miss Cardinegh, but somebody is doing it, and it’s his kind of service—the perilous, hard-riding kind. Nobody but a man on the Inside of Asia would attempt it. There was an American, named Butzel, shot by the Chinese on the Liao River ten days ago. He was not an accredited correspondent, as I understand it, but was using the war for a living. Butzel’s death was wired in from the interior somewhere, and they had it back from New York in Shanghai when I was there. Did you hear?”

“No.”

“It appears that Butzel planned to get into Liaoyang for the battle,” Talliaferro went on, “whether the Japanese liked it or not. About the place where the Taitse flows into the Liao, the river-pirates murdered him——”

Talliaferro stopped, startled by the look in the face of the woman. Her eyes were wide, almost electric with suffering, her face colorless. The lamp-light heightened the effects; also her dress, which was of black entire. Talliaferro noted such things. He always remembered her hand that moment, as it was raised to check him, white, fragile, emotional.

“What is it, Miss Cardinegh?” he asked quickly.

“I was thinking,” she replied steadily, “that Mr. Routledge is there in all likelihood—‘playing the Chinese end,’ as you call it. I was thinking that he might not have heard that he is vindicated—that he might be murdered before he learned that my father had confessed.”

She hurried away before the dinner was half through, and Talliaferro was left to dislike himself, for a short period, for bringing up the Butzel murder.... Noreen sat again by the window in her room. The story had frightened her, so that she felt the need of being alone to think. The dreadfulness of the night before did not return, however.... The moon rose high to find the Wall again—every part of it, winding in the mountains.... Was it not possible that Talliaferro was over-conscious of the dangers of the Chinese end? Routledge had been up there, possibly since the Yalu battle, and he had proved a master in these single-handed services of his.... She had heard of Talliaferro’s capacity to command the highest price, heard of him as an editorial dictator and of his fine grasp on international affairs, but her father had once remarked that the Excalibur “did not relish dangling his body in the dirty area between two firing lines.”... There was hope in her heart, and she slept.

“Please don’t apologize, Mr. Talliaferro,” she said the next morning, when he met her sorrowfully. “It is I who should apologize. For a moment you made me see vividly the dangers up yonder, but I put it all away and had a real rest. Tell me about the field and Oku.”

Talliaferro was inclined to talk very little, as a rule, but he had brooded deeply upon his failure in this service, and it was rather a relief to speak—with Noreen Cardinegh to listen.

“At least, we have added to the gaiety of nations with our silence in the field,” he said. “It has been the silence of the Great Wall yonder. We knew nothing even of the main strategy, which was familiar to all outside who cared to follow the war. Japanese officers were assigned to overhear what we said to one another. They even opened our personal mail. The field-telegraph was hot day and night with the war-business, so that our messages were hung up for days, even with the life cut out of them. And then when Oku drove into action we were always back with the reserves—not that I think a correspondent can do a battle classic for his cable-editor, simply because he mingles first hand with shrapnel; but we had only the sun and stars to go by as to which was north and south. Think of it, and the man who writes a war-classic must have a conception of the whole land and sea array, and an inner force of his own, to make his sentences shine——”

She smiled a little and straightened her shoulders to breathe deeply the good sea air. They were walking out toward the Wall.

“But suppose he has the big conception, as you say, and then goes into the heart of the thing”—her voice became tense—“where the poor brave brutes are coming together to die?”

“He’ll unquestionably do it better,” said Talliaferro, regarding her blowing hair with satisfaction to the artistic sense he cultivated. “Physical heroism is cheap—the cheapest utility of the nations—but it is not without inspiration to watch.... We had neither—neither facts nor blood with Oku.”

Long and weary were those August days in Shanhaikwan. Noreen lived for the end of the battle, and with a prayer that it would end the war and bring in—all the correspondents. Over and over she mapped the war-country in her mind, with a lone horseman shutting out her view of armies. There were moments at night in which she felt that Routledge-san was not far away—even Liaoyang was less than three hundred miles away.... Those last days of the month—only a woman can bear such terrors of tension. Each night-train now brought vagrant sentences from the field, bearing upon the unparalleled sacrifices of men by the Japanese. Throughout August thirty-first, Shanhaikwan waited expectantly for a decision from the battle, but when the night-train was in the Russians were still holding. Late in the afternoon of September first, Talliaferro sought Miss Cardinegh bringing an exciting rumor that the Japanese had won the battle and the city.

“There’s another thing,” he added. “The English agent of the trading company here—the man of whom you don’t approve—has heard from Bingley. He will be in from Wangcheng to-night, and something big is up. Bingley has called for a horse to meet him at the train—a fast horse. I’ll wager there’s an American correspondent on the train, Miss Cardinegh, and that the ‘Horse-killer’ plans to beat him to the cable-office in the half-mile from the station. He wouldn’t wire for a horse if he were alone. Another matter. Borden, the American Combined Press man here, looks to have something big under cover. Altogether, I think there’ll be great stuff on the cable to-night. The chief trouble is, there won’t be any core—to Bingley’s apple.... I’ll call for you in a half-hour—if I may—and we’ll walk down to the train together.”

“Thank you. Of course,” she answered.... That half-hour pulled a big tribute of nervous energy. Noreen did not know what to think, but she fought back hope with all the strength which months of self-war had given....

The train appeared at last through the gap in the Great Wall—cleared torturingly slow in the twilight. Talliaferro directed her eyes to two saddle-horses on the platform. Borden, the American, was in touch with a China-boy who held a black stallion of notorious prowess.... She hardly noted. The train held her eyes. Her throat was dry—her heart stormed with emotion.... She did not scream. Routledge hung far out from the platform—searching to locate his mount. She covered her face in her parasol.... This was the end of a race from the field with Bingley.... She choked back her heart’s cry, lest it complicate.

Routledge sped past her—leaped with a laugh into the saddle of the black stallion. His eye swept the crowd—but the yellow silk of the parasol shielded her face. He spurred off toward the cable-office—with Bingley thundering behind on a gray mount.... Not till then did she dare to scream:

“Win! Ride to win, Routledge-san!”

Out of the shouting crowd, she ran after the horsemen—past the Rest House, through the mud-huts of the native quarter.... On she sped, the night filled with glory for her eyes.... Suddenly there was a shot—then four more—from ahead. Fear bound her limbs, and she struggled on—as in the horrid weights of an evil dream.

TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER
ROUTLEDGE, BROODING UPON THE MIGHTY SPECTACLE OF A JAPANESE BIVOUAC, TRACES A WORLD-WAR TO THE LEAK IN ONE MAN’S BRAIN

Parting from Noreen Cardinegh on the Bund at Shanghai, Routledge walked back through the darkness to the German Inn far out on the Hankow road. He was not conscious of the streets, nor of time passed. Not a word he had spoken to the woman could he remember, but all that she had said recurred again and again. He was torn within. The wound was too deep for heavy pain at first—that would come later with the drawing-together—but he was dazed, weakened. He turned into the door of the hostelry and recalled that he had nothing to do there. He had engaged passage on the Sungkiang for Chifu that afternoon. His baggage was aboard, and the ship lying on the water-front which he had left. He turned back, without any particular emotion at his absentmindedness, but he charged himself with an evil recklessness for tarrying on the Bund in the afternoon.... Finacune had seen him, and Noreen....

Jerry Cardinegh was still alive—lost to wars, lost to friends, but still alive. He was close to death, his brain probably already dead to big things, and he had not told! Noreen would never know. Routledge tried to be glad. All his praying, hiding, and suffering had been to save her from knowing. His lips formed a meaningless declarative sentence to the effect that he was glad; meaningless, because there was no sanction in his heart. He was ill and very weary. He wished it were time for the prophesied wound, and for Noreen to come to him. He was not powerful enough that moment, walking back to the Bund, to face the future, and hold the thought that he was to remain an outcast....

“She will come to me when Jerry is dead,” he repeated, and for the time he could not fight it.... He went aboard, forgetting dinner, and dropped upon his berth. The Sungkiang put off, out into the river, and long afterward lifted to the big swell in the offing. These were but faint touches of consciousness. His mind held greater matters—the strength of her hand, the breath, the fragrance, the vehemence, the glory of the woman in the wintry dusk, as she rushed back to her work—the tearing tragedy of parting; again the pitiless mountains of separation....

Loose articles were banging about the floor; the pendent oil-lamp creaked with the pitching of the ship. It was after midnight. Routledge caught up the great frieze coat and went out on the main-deck. It was a cold ruffian of a night, but it restored his strength.

She would keep her promise and come to him, when her father was dead. He faced the thought now that she would never know the truth; that Jerry Cardinegh would have spoken long since, if he could.... In some deep dark place of the earth, she would find him; and some British eye, ever keen, would see them together—the lady and the outcast.... He would send her away—put on a martyrdom of frost and steel—and send her away.... If he lied, saying that he wanted no woman—she would go back.... But Noreen was to find him wounded, fallen. Might he not, in delirium, utter the truth that her father failed to confess? No, the human will could prevent that! He would go down close to the very Gates with his lips locked.

“... I shall take care of your life for you—even in the Leper Valley!” Routledge thought he must be mad to imagine those words. Her face—as the words came to him—had been blotted out in the snow and the dark; yet it was her voice, and the words rang through his soul. She could not have seen Rawder nor the Hindu. They were lost in Northern India. He knew nothing of Jasper having passed the hut in Rydamphur that night, nor of his meeting with Noreen on ship-board. The Leper Valley, hidden in the great mountains of Southern China, was scarcely a name to the world. Could Noreen have heard the name, and used it merely as a symbol of speech for the uttermost parts of the earth? This was the only adjustment of the mystery upon a material basis.

He fought it all out that night in the icy gale on the main-deck of the Sungkiang, and entered upon the loneliest, harshest campaign and the bleakest season of his life.... Often it came to him with a great, almost an overpowering surge—the passion to look into the eyes of Noreen Cardinegh again and to stand among men, but he fought it with the grim, immutable fact that he had taken her father’s crime and must keep it, stand by it, with his dearest efforts until the end. If fate destined some time to lift the burden—that was resistless.... Except in bringing in his stories to the cables, he passed the spring and summer in the deepest seclusion.

This he knew: if he were seen by any of his old friends among the English, the word would be carried to Jerry Cardinegh, who, if still alive, might be stirred to confession. To save Noreen from this was the first point of his sacrifice. If her father were dead, unconfessed, and word reached her that the outcast had been seen in a certain part of Manchuria, she would come to share his hell-haunted-life—a thought which his whole manhood shunned. Moreover, if he were seen by the British, the sinister powerful fingers of the secret service would stretch toward him; in which case, if nothing worse happened, he would be driven from the terrain of war. Work was his only boon—furious, unabating, world-rousing work. God so loved the world that he gave unto poor forlorn man his work.... No more loitering on Bunds or Foreign Concessions for Cosmo Routledge.

From various Chinese bases, he made flying incursions into the war-belt for the World-News—a lonely, perilous, hard-shipping, and hard-riding service, but astonishingly successful. It was his flash from Chifu which told New York that the war was on before the declaration. This was on the night of February eighth. A strong but not a roaring west wind brought Togo’s firing across the gulf. He chanced a message and verified it before dawn by an incoming German ship, which had steamed past the fortress when the Russian fleet was attacked.

Again, he was with the Russians at Wangcheng before the port was closed, and got the story of the Yalu fight. This through John Milner, the American consul at Wangcheng, in whom he made a staunch and valued friend, regretting that it was necessary to do so under the name of “A. V. Weed.” Milner was an old World-News editor, a man of stirring energy, and strong in the graces of the Russians at his post. He was ardent to serve all American interests, and the World-News in particular. He presented Routledge to General Borodoffsky, who told the story of the battle; and there was a fine touch in the fact that the general wept as he related the Russian defeat. The story proved more complete and accurate than any which the correspondents with Kuroki managed to get through the Japanese censor. Kuroki’s great losses by drowning were for the first time brought out. Borodoffsky declared with tears that the future of the war must not be judged by this battle, as the Russian defeat was due entirely to an error of judgment. Routledge was leaving Wangcheng with the story when two British correspondents arrived. This prevented his return. The Borodoffsky story was filed in Shanhaikwan.

In a sea-going junk, the third week of May, Routledge crossed the Liaotung Gulf, hoping to get into Port Arthur, which was not yet invested. Instead, he stumbled onto the Nanshan story. From the northern promontory of Kinchow he caught a big and valuable conception of this literatesque engagement of the land and sea forces, and returned with it to Chifu for filing.

Back to lower Liaotung again, in early June. In spite of every precaution, one of Togo’s gunboats ran him down in Society Bay, and he was sent ashore under a guard. Great luck served him, inasmuch as there were no English with the Japanese at this place, Pulatien, where he was held for ten days, while the officers debated upon his credentials. It was here that Routledge encountered the prettiest feature-story of the war—the duel of Watanabe and Major Volbars, a prisoner from Nanshan. The Japanese escorted him to his junk at last, and he put off with orders from one of Togo’s ensigns to return no more to Kwantung waters. The battle of Telissu was fought on this day at sea, and he missed it entirely. With English now in Wangcheng and Chifu, Routledge ordered his Chinese to sail north, and to put him ashore at Yuenchen, a little port twenty miles to the west of the Liao’s mouth.

It was only by a squeak that the order was carried out. That was a night of furies on the yellow gulf. Bent in the hold, thigh-deep in tossing water, Routledge recalled the hovel in Rydamphur with a sorry smile. It did not seem at that moment that the storm would ever permit him to be maimed on land—or a woman to come to him. The old craft was beaten about under bare poles in a roaring black that seemed to drop from chaos. The Chinese fought for life, but the gray of death-fear was upon them. Bruised, almost strangled, Routledge crouched in the musty hold, until his mind fell at last into a strange abstraction, from which he aroused after an unknown time. His physical weariness was extreme, but it did not seem possible that he could have slept, standing in black, foaming water, and with a demoniacal gale screeching outside. Yet certainly something had gone from him and had taken his consciousness, or the better part of it.... It was this night that Noreen Cardinegh had entered at dusk her little house in Minimasacuma-cho and met by the easel the visible thought-form of her lover.

Day broke with the wind lulled, and the old craft riding monster seas, her poles still to the sky. The daylight sail brought him to Yuenchen; from whence he made his way northward by land to Pingyang. This town was but an hour’s saddle to the east of the railroad and telegraph at Koupangtze—twenty miles west of the junction of the Taitse and the Liao river, and fifty miles west of Liaoyang. Here he established headquarters completely out of the white man’s world, rested and wrote mail stories for several weeks. Toward the end of July, he set out on a ten days’ saddle trip toward Liaoyang, with the idea of becoming familiar with the topography of the country, in preparation for the battle, already in sight. It was on this trip that he was hailed one afternoon by an American, named Butzel. This young man was sitting on the aft-gunnel of a river-junk, rolling a cigarette, when Routledge turned his horse upon the Taitse river-road, four or five miles to the east of the Liao. Routledge would have avoided the meeting had he been given a chance, but Butzel gaily ordered his Chinese to put ashore. The voice was that of a man from the Middle States—and Routledge filled with yearning to take a white hand. His only friend since he had left Rawder in India was Consul Milner at Wangcheng.

Butzel had journeyed thus deep into the elder world—as natural an explorer as ever left behind his nerves and his saving portion of fear. He hadn’t any particular credentials, he said, and hadn’t played the newspaper game very strongly up to now. The Japanese had refused to permit him to go out with any of the armies; and he had tried to get into Port Arthur with a junk, but Togo had driven him off. He had very little money, and was tackling China to get to the Russian lines. It was his idea for the Russians to capture him, and, incidentally, to show him how they could defend Liaoyang. In a word, he was eluding Japan, bluffing his way through the interior of China, and about to enforce certain hospitality from the Russians. A great soul—in this little man, Butzel.

Routledge delighted in him, but feared for his life. He himself was playing a similar lone-hand, but he carried Red-beard insignia, purchased at a big price; and when he had ventured into a river or sea-junk, he had taken pains to arrange that his receipt for a certain extortion was hung high on the foremast. Thus was he ever approved by the fascinating brotherhood of junk pirates. These were details entirely above the Butzel purse and inclination. The two men parted in fine spirit after an hour, the adventurer urging his Chinese up the Taitse toward the Russian lines. He was not so poor as he had been, and he yelled back joyously to Routledge that there wasn’t enough trails in this little piker of a planet to keep them from meeting again.

His words proved true. Poor Butzel rode back in state that afternoon, his head fallen against the tiller and a bullet hole in his breast. Even his clothing had been taken. The junk was empty except for the body. With a heavy heart, Routledge attended to the burial and marked the spot. That night he rode to Koupangtze, and, by paying the charges, succeeded in arranging for a brief message to be cabled to the World-News; also a telegram to the American consul at Shanghai.

So much is merely a suggestion of the work that told for his paper that summer. For weeks at a time he was in the saddle, or junking it by sea and river. Except when driven to the telegraph, he avoided every port town and every main-travelled road. He was lean, light but prodigiously strong. A trencherman of ordinary valor would have dragged out a hateful existence of semi-starvation upon the rations that sufficed for Routledge; and none but a man in whom a giant’s strength was concentrated could have followed his travels. The old Manchurian trails burned under his ponies; and, queerly enough, he never ruined a mount. He had left Shanghai on the first of February, ill from confinement, the crowds, and his long sojourn in the great heat of India. The hard physical life at sea in the Liao gulf and afield in Manchuria, and, possibly more than anything, his life apart from the English, restored him to a health of the finest and toughest texture.

China challenged him. He never could feel the tenderness of regard for the Yellow Empire that India inspired, but it held an almost equal fascination. China dwelt in a duller, more alien light to his eyes; the people were more complicated, less placable and lovable, than Hindus, but the same mysterious stillness, the same dust of ages, he found in both interiors; and in both peoples the same imperturbable patience and unfathomable capacity to suffer and be silent. Routledge moved in towns almost as unknown to the world as the Martian surfaces; learned enough of the confusion of tongues to procure necessities; supplied himself with documents, bearing the seals of certain dark fraternities, which appeared to pass him from place to place without harm: and, with a luck that balanced the handicap of an outcast, and an energy, mental and physical, utterly impossible to a man with peace in his heart, he pushed through, up to Liaoyang, an almost incredible season’s work.

More and more the thought was borne upon him during July and August that the coming big battle would bring to him a change of fortune—if only a change from one desolation to another. He felt that his war-service was nearing its end. He did not believe that Liaoyang was to end the war, but he thought it would close the campaign for the year; and he planned to conclude his own campaign with a vivid intimate portrait of the battle. Meanwhile he hung afar from the Russian and Japanese lines, and little Pingyang had a fire lit for him and a table spread when he rode in from his reconnoissance.

Late in August, when the artillery began, Routledge crossed to the south bank of the Taitse with a pair of good horses, and left them about two miles to the west of the city with a Pingyang servant who had proven trustworthy. On the dawn of the thirtieth he made a wide detour behind Oku, nearly to Nodzu’s lines, and watched the battle from Sha peak—one of the highest points of the range. He had studied Liaoyang long through the intricate Chinese maps; and as the heights had cleared the fighting-field for Bingley, so now did Routledge grasp the topography from his eyrie during that first day of the real battle. Similarly also, he hit upon Kuroki’s flank movement as the likeliest strategy of the Japanese aggression, and he came to regard it as a fact before starting for the free cable at Wangcheng the following night.

This day netted nothing in so far as the real battle color was considered. That night he closed up on Oku’s rear, crossing a big valley and climbing a lesser range. Daylight found him in a densely thicketed slope overlooking the city and the Japanese command. In that hot red dawn, he beheld the bivouac of the Islanders—a crowded valley stretching away miles to the east in the fast lifting gloom; leagues of stirring men, the faint smell of wood-smoke and trampled turf, the gray, silent city over the reddened hills, the slaty coil of the river behind.

The mighty spectacle gripped the heart of the watcher; and there came to him, with an awful but thrilling intensity, the whole story of the years which had prepared this amphitheatre for blood on this sweet last summer day.... Oppression in Tyrone; treachery in India; the Anglo-Japanese alliance; the Russo-Japanese war—a logical line of cause and effect running true as destiny, straight as a sunbeam through all these huge and scattered events—holding all Asia in the palm of history! Farther back, to the Kabul massacre, was to be traced the red history of this day—the mad British colonel; Shubar Khan!... And what did the future hold? If Russia called the French and Germans to her aid, England, by treaty, was called to the aid of Japan. America might be drawn by the needs of England, or for the protection of her softening cluster of Philippine grapes. Famine in a Tyrone town; a leak in one Tyrone patriot’s brain—and a world-war!...

The click of a rifle jerked Routledge out of his musings. A Japanese lieutenant and a non-commissioned officer were standing twenty paces away. The enlisted man had him covered.

TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER
ROUTLEDGE STRIKES A CONTRAST BETWEEN THE JAPANESE EMPEROR AND THE JAPANESE FIGHTING-MAN, WHILE OKU CHARGES INTO A BLIZZARD OF STEEL

Queerly enough, Routledge’s first thought was that the moment of the wound had come, but this was out of the question. These men would not fire at him. They would send him to the rear under a guard; or, worse, escort him to the command where the other correspondents were held. The Englishmen would then suggest to the Japanese that their captive had once proved a traitor to England, and that it would be well to look deep into his present business, lest he repeat.... He would miss the battle, be detained for a Russian spy—and Noreen would hear.

Routledge was ordered to approach, and obeyed, swallowing Failure. The lieutenant spoke English, but disdained to look at proffered credentials. The sergeant gripped Routledge’s arm, and his superior led the way down the slope through the lines of troops. Many of the little soldiers of Oku were eating rice and drinking tea from bowls; some were bathing their bodies, others cleansing their teeth with great zeal, using soaps and pointed sticks. These meant to be gathered unto their fathers that day with clean mouths. Down and forward, the American was led, no word being spoken until they were in the midst of Oku’s front. Here was the field headquarters of some high officer of the left wing. Routledge breathed a hope that action would be joined before he was ordered back. The unknown commander stood in the centre of a thick protecting cordon of men. Evidently he was too rushed at present to attend the case of the detained civilian. Aides and orderlies spurred out with dispatches, and others riding in took their places.

Three or four minutes had passed when certain commands went ripping down the unformed lines and action was indeed joined. The lieutenant was brushed away in the torrent of infantry which just now swept over them, but the sergeant held grimly to his prisoner’s arm. Oku had ordered the first charge of the day. This was the reeking red splash on the map of all the world.

The soldiers leaped over Routledge and his captor. Shielding his head from their boots and rifle-butts, the American looked deep into the sweating brown faces that rushed past—red, squinting eyes, upper lips twisted with a fury they could not have explained, the snarling muscles drawn tight—and not a zephyr of fear in the command! Some of the men still had their eating-sticks and bowls and paper napkins. One stuffed the contents of a dish of rice into his mouth as he ran—an eight-pound rifle clapped between his elbow and ribs.

The correspondent warmed to the human atoms hurtling by and to the sergeant who stuck so fast to his arm. There was something tremendous in the delusion of these poor pawns who were doing their cruel work so well. There was an infernal majesty in the huge gamble for the old gray walls of Liaoyang on this gorgeous morning.... War is immense and final—for the big devil-clutched souls who make it—an achievement, indeed, to gather and energize and hurl this great force against an enemy, but what a rotten imposition upon the poor little obscure men who fight, not a tithe the richer if they take all Asia! So the thoughts of Routledge surged. Into the havoc, from time to time, he threw a sentence, wrung from the depths of his understanding:

“... Once a father threw his children out of the sleigh to hold back a wolf-pack—as he whipped his horse to the village. Would you call such a man ‘father’?... Yet you call a nation ‘fatherland’ that hurls you now to the wolves!... Oh, ye of mighty faith!... Pawns—poor pawns—of plague, famine, war around the world—God, tell us why the many are consumed to ashes at the pleasure of the few!... Oh, glorious Patriotism—what sins are committed in thy name!”

The great system of Russian fortifications now opened fire upon the Japanese charge. Men were falling. The bulk of the infantry avalanche had passed, and smoke was crowding out the distances. The long p-n-n-n-g of the high bullets, and the instant b-zrp of the close ones, were stimulus for that fast, clear thinking which so often comes close to death. Routledge’s brain seemed to hold itself aloof from his body, the better to grasp and synthesize the startling actions of the present.

The smoke blurred all but a finger-bone of the valley; yet from that part he could reconstruct the whole horrid skeleton of a Twentieth-century crime.... The brown line of Japanese rolled up against the first Russian trench. Routledge thought of toy soldiers, heads bent forward, legs working, and guns of papier maché in bayonet charge. The works wore a white ruff of smoke, and its lace was swept by stray winds down over the fallen....

The grip upon his arm relaxed. For a moment Routledge thought he was hit, when the blood rushed down the veins of his arm where the tightened fingers had been. He was free—and at what a cost! The little sergeant was down—his legs wriggling and beating against the American’s, the “red badge of courage” widening on his breast. Routledge bent over him and looked long into the dying face—forgetting the world and the war, forgetting all but the spirit behind the hour.

The face was brown, oriental. In the corner of the mouth was a flake of rice, and the coarse-grained dust of Manchuria was over all. The eyes were turned back, and the ears were bad. Evolution was young in the shape of the head and the cut of those ears—small, thick, close to the skull, criminal ears. But the mouth was beautiful! It was carved as if some God had done it—and on a fine morning when joy was abroad in the world—and the perfection of the human mouth was the theme of the day.

Routledge had not even water to give, but he said, “Hello.”

Deep understanding came to him from the dying face. He saw what it meant to this little soldier to go out for his Emperor—saw the faith and pity of it all. It was the smiling face of a man who comes home after years of travail to the marvel of a loved woman’s arms.

“Sayonara!” the fine lips muttered. One of the sweetest and saddest words of human speech—this Japanese farewell.

“Sayonara!” Routledge repeated.... The body jerked itself out, but the smile remained. The whole story of the Japanese conquest stirred in Routledge’s brain. It was all in the smile upon the face of the guard—all in that one perishable portrait of joy.

Routledge had once seen the Emperor for whom this soldier died with a smile. Though it was forenoon, he had been forced to put on evening-clothes for the Presence. Mutsuhito came back to his mind as he bent over the fresh corpse....

“He has no such mouth as yours, little sergeant,” he said in a swift, strange fashion. “His head is not so good as your hard, bad head, though his ears are better. He was dazed with champagne, as you have never been. He had the look of an epileptic, and they had to bring him a red-blooded woman of the people to get a son from him—and that son a defective!... A soft, inbred pulp of a man, without strength of will or hand or brain, and God only knows what rudiment of a soul—such is the Lord of Ten Thousand Years, whom you die for with a smile. You are greater than the Empire you serve, little sergeant—greater than the Emperor you die for; since he is not even a clean abstraction.... God pity you—God pity you all!”

The sun sent streamers into the white smoke drapery upon the Russian bank. The Island Empire men were thrashing against it. They met with their breasts the fire that spurted continuously from the ledges. One man of a Japanese company lived to gain the top of the trench. He was skewered on Russian bayonets and shaken down among his writhing fellow-soldiers, as the wing of a chicken is served upon a waiting plate. Running, crawling, Routledge made his way down and forward.

The Japanese hope lives high above the loss of companies. It was a glad morning for the Island Empire men, a bright task they were given to do. Other companies, full quota, were shot forward to tread upon the dead and beat themselves to death against the entrenchment. A third torrent was rolled against the Russians before the second had suffered a complete blood-letting.... Routledge saw one five-foot demon wielding his rifle-butt upon the rim of the trench, in the midst of gray Russian giants. For an instant he was a human tornado, filled with the idea to kill—that Brownie—then he was sucked down and stilled. Routledge wondered if they completely wiped out the little man’s smile at the last.

He was ill from the butchery, and his mind was prone to grope away from the bleeding heart of things; still, he missed little of the great tragedy which unfolded in the smoke. And always Oku, unparalleled profligate of men, coiled up his companies and sprung them against a position which Napoleon would have called impregnable—Oku, whose voice was quiet as a mystic’s prayer. The thought came to Routledge that the women of America would tear down the capitol at Washington with their hands, if the walls contained a monster who had spent the blood of their sons and lovers as Oku was doing now.

A new tumult in the air! It was like an instant horrid crash of drums in the midst of a violin solo. Artillery now roared down upon Oyama’s left wing.... The wildest dream of hell was on. Routledge, crawling westward through the pit of fire, saw a platoon of infantry smashed as a cue-ball shatters a fifteen block in pool.... Westward under the Russian guns, he crawled through the sun-shot, smoke-charged shambles, miraculously continuing alive in that thick, steady, annihilating blizzard of steel—his brain desperate with the rush of images and the shock of sounds. Over a blood-wet turf he crawled, among the quivering parts of men....

Silence. Oku stopped to breathe and pick up the fragments.... From far up on the Russian works—it was like the celestial singing in the ears of the dying—began a distant, thrilling music. Some regiment or brigade, swinging into the intrenchments to relieve a weary command, had burst into song.... Once before Routledge had caught a touch of this enchantment, during the Boxer Rebellion. He had never been able to forget Jerry Cardinegh’s telling of the Russian battle-hymns at Plevna.... Great emotions bowed him now. Another terrace of defense caught up the song, and the winds that cleared the reeking valley of smoke carried along the vibrant inspiration. Every Russian heart gripped the grand contagion. From terrace to terrace, from trench to trench, from pit to emplacement, that glorious thunder stalked, a company, a battery, a brigade, at a stride. Each voice was a raw, dust-bitten shout—the whole a majestic harmony, from the cannon-meat of Liaoyang! Sons of the North, gray, sodden, sorrow-stunted men of pent misery and unlit souls—Finlander, Siberian, Caspian, Caucasian—hurling forth their heart-hunger in a tumult of song that shook the continent. The spirit of All the Russias giving tongue—the tragedy of Poland, the clank of chains, the mockery of palaces, the iron pressure of frost, the wail of the wolf-pack on frozen tundras, the cry of the crushed, the blind groping of the human to God—it was all in that rhythmic roar, all the dreadful annals of a decadent people.

As it was born, so it died,—that music,—from terrace to terrace, the last wavering chant from out the city walls. The little Japanese made no answer. Routledge could not help but see the mark of the beast in contrast. It wasn’t the Russians that bothered Oku, but the Russian position. Kuroki would pull them out of that.... Song or steel, they would take Liaoyang. They prepared to charge again.

In the disorder of the next charge Routledge crossed the railroad and passed out of the Japanese lines. Late afternoon, as he hurried westward for his horses, he met the eyes of Bingley. He was not given a chance to pass another way. The race for the cable was on.

TWENTY-THIRD CHAPTER
ROUTLEDGE ENCOUNTERS THE “HORSE-KILLER” ON THE FIELD OF LIAOYANG, AND THEY RACE FOR THE UNCENSORED CABLE AT SHANHAIKWAN

To each man the intention of the other was clear as the purpose of a fire-department’s run. One of them would file the first uncensored story of the great battle. Bingley had given up his chance to follow the Japanese army, and had set his stony face to freedom for this end—and England could not have horsed a man more unwhippable. Routledge, striding into the sunset, toward the place he had left his mounts, discovered with a smile that his pace was quickening, quickening. The character of the man just passed was an inspiration to rivalry. Moreover, from a newspaper standpoint, the issue at hand was big among dreams. The Great God, News, is a marvellous master. Would England or America be first to connect with Manchuria by wire? World-News or Thames? If New York beat London, Dartmore would trace the story.... Dartmore had been a savage. Bingley had been a savage.

Routledge laughed aloud. He had long since put away any resentment toward either of these men, but there was vim, and glow, in getting into the struggle again. He felt that he had earned his entry to this race. He had counted upon taking the chances of discovery. Already Bingley had seen him, and the word would go back; but the result of it would require time. He had long planned to close his own campaign for the year, even if the Japanese pushed on to Mukden. He would go deeper, past following, into China—even to the Leper Valley.

It was a momentous incident to Routledge—this meeting with the “Horse-killer.” The quick, startled, sullen look on the face of Bingley—not a flicker of a smile, not even a scornful smile, to answer his own—had meant that Cardinegh, dead or alive, had not told.

Bingley found the highway two miles west of the railroad, and spurred south in the darkness at the rate of about seven miles an hour. He meant to do six or seven hours of this before resting his mount.... Between twelve and one in the morning—and at most twenty miles to go! If there was anything left in his horse, after an hour’s rest, so much the better. Otherwise he could do it on foot, crossing the river above Fengmarong by six in the morning. This would leave two hours for the last two or three miles into Wangcheng. As for the other, without a mount, Bingley did not concede it to be within human possibility for him to reach the Chinese Eastern at any point to-morrow morning. Evidently Routledge had not planned to get away so soon. It would take eighteen hours at least to reach Wangcheng by the river, and Routledge, aiming westward, seemed to have this route in view.... With all his conjecturing, Bingley could find no peace of mind. Even if Routledge had not planned to reach travelled-lines to-morrow, would not the sight of a rival, with his speed signals out and whistling for right of way, stir him to competition? Such was his respect for the man who had passed on, that Bingley could not find serenity in judging the actions and acumen of Routledge by ordinary weights and measures.

Any other British correspondent would have hailed the outcast with the old welcome, notwithstanding the race-challenge which his appearance involved. On the morning he left Tokyo, five months before, Bingley had also promised Miss Cardinegh to carry the news of her father’s confession and death to Routledge, if he should be the first to find him. It did not occur to Bingley now, isolated as he had been so long, that this was the first time Routledge had been seen. Moreover, in their last meeting, at the Army and Navy ball, there had been a brief but bitter passage of words. Bingley was not the man to make an overture when there was a chance of its being repelled. Finally, the sudden discovery of a trained man, with carnage behind and the cable ahead, was a juggernaut which crushed the life from every other thought in his brain.

Routledge found his horses in excellent condition. The Chinese whom he had brought from Pingyang had proved faithful before, but with all the natives, not alone the banditti and river-thieves, emboldened by the war, the safe holding of his property was a joy indeed. At seven in the evening, the sky black with gathering storm, he left his servant, rich in taels and blessings, and turned westward along the Taitse river-road. This was neither the best nor the shortest way, but Routledge preferred to be impeded by ruts, even by chasms, than by Japanese sentries. With Bingley’s full panoply of credentials it would have been different.

Sixty-five miles to ride, a river to cross, an audience with Consul Milner, a train to catch, to say nothing of enforced delays by the possible interest of the Japanese in his movements—all in fourteen hours.

As Bingley conjectured, the chance meeting had hastened the plan of Routledge. He had intended to reach Wangcheng the following day, but by no means in time for the morning train; in fact, he had determined to tarry at the American consulate until the decision from the battle should come in. Wangcheng had changed hands since his last call at the port, but he counted on the wise and winning American to be as finely appreciated by the Japanese as he had been by the Russians. Milner would get the returns from the battle almost as soon as the Japanese commander at the base. The one word victory or defeat, and a line covering the incidental strategic cause, was all that Routledge needed for a startling story. He had mastered the field, and Oku had supplied a rainbow of pigments.

Bingley, having left the field, would not loiter on the road to the cable, nor would he halt before reaching an uncensored cable—therefore Shanhaikwan to-morrow night! Routledge did not care to accept second place, if hard-riding would win first. He faced the longer journey, and also set apart an hour before train-time for an interview with the Consul. It was eminently plain to him that this day had marked the crisis of the great battle, even if it had not already ended with nightfall. The unparalleled fury of Oku’s assaults was significant to this effect. To-morrow would doubtless bring the verdict; and all day to-morrow he would be on train to Shanhaikwan, in touch with Milner by wire at every station. Even if he reached the cable with the battle still raging, he could file the story of the great conflict, as it was synthesized in one man’s brain—up to the point of the historic last sentence.... Even as he rode, the lines and sentences fused in his mind, a colorful, dashing, galvanic conception that burned for expression.

On and on, hours and miles; cloud-bursts and flashes of lightning to show the trail ahead—until he came to doubt his watch, even the dawn of a new day, in the pressure of the illusion formed of dragging hours and darkened distances.

The rains helped to keep his mounts fresh. Every two hours he changed. The beasts had been long together, and either led with a slackened thong. He ran them very little, and it was after midnight before he dulled the fine edge of their fettle. They were tough, low-geared Tartar beasts, heavy-breasted, short in the pasterns, and quartered like hunters—built for rough trails and rough wear. Routledge slapped and praised them, riding light. It would take more than one gruelling night under such a horseman to break their hearts.

Two hours after midnight the rain ceased, and the wrung clouds parted for the moon. The hill country was passed. Routledge moved swiftly along the river-flats. It was the second night he had not slept, and his fatigue was no trifle, but he was drilled to endure. It was not in him to make a strongly reckonable matter out of muscular stiffness and cuticle abrasions. True, rain softens the glaze of a saddle, and long riding on the sticky leather tears the limbs, but Routledge had a body that would obey so long as consciousness lasted. He used it that night.

Five-thirty in the morning; daylight; sixty miles put behind. Ahead far in the new day he discerned the Japanese outposts of Fengmarong; and on the right hand was the big, mottled Liao, swollen with flood. If he were to be detained by the Japanese, he preferred it to be on the opposite bank—the Wangcheng side. Routledge rode up to the ferry-scow and called for service. Yellow babies were playing like cinnamon-cubs on the shore; two women were cooking rice and fish; two men were asleep in the sail-tackle. These he aroused. They helped him with the horses, half-lifting the weary, trembling beasts aboard. Cups of tea; rice with black dressing, as the scow made the opposite landing at a forty-five degree angle! A quick and safe crossing; and two hours for the Japanese lines, the American Consul, and the Chinese Eastern!... A distant call through the morning light! Bingley, horseless, imperiously demands the return of the craft to the Fengmorang bank.

Routledge had hoped to be missed by the other, at least until train-time. He smiled at the compelling incidents of the race thus far, and at the surpassing prospects—even though he chilled at the thought that the Japanese in Wangcheng would have big excuse to detain him if Bingley intimated that his rival had once betrayed England to the Russian spies on the Indian border. Consul Milner would sweat, indeed, to free him against that....

Yet Routledge had a feeling that he would win against Bingley. Work had always favored him. So far he had borne out the prophecy that he would not be wounded in battle, in a manner past astonishment. It was no less than a miracle—his escape from the firing of both armies at Liaoyang. Often during the night-ride he had thought of the wound that was to come to him—thought with a chill of dread of the lawless country he passed through. Now, with Wangcheng ahead, and in touch with the safe-lines of foreign-travel—the chance seemed minimized once more. There must be significance in this.... He looked back and saw the Chinese beating up against the river to the Fengmarong landing, where Bingley waited, doubtless frothing his curb.

At the edge of the town Routledge was arrested by a five-foot Japanese sentry, and was locked with his world tidings in a garrison, lately Russian, which overlooked Wangcheng’s little square. He wrote “A. V. Weed” on a slip of paper and asked to have it taken to Consul Milner; then sat down by the barred window to watch the Consulate across the Square. It was now seven o’clock. The train left in an hour, and the station was a mile away. Minutes dragged by.

An enlivening spectacle from the window. The “Horse-killer” is being borne across the Square under a Japanese guard! The little sentries at the edge of town have been busy, this sweet-smelling morning after the rain! Even at the distance, Routledge perceives that the Englishman’s face is warmed with a lust for murder, and he hears the Englishman’s voice demanding his Consul. Bingley is borne into the garrison, and his voice and step are heard throughout the halls. The voice continues—as he is locked in the apartment next to Routledge’s.

Fifteen dreadful minutes. Bingley is a noisy, unlovely devil in the next room, beating against his bars. Routledge remembers what Hans Breittmann said of the caged orang-outang: “There is too much ego in his cosmos.” The “Horse-killer” does not know that his rival is so near—as he cries unto his heaven of martial law, for artillery to shoot his way out of this town of beastly, pig-headed Japanese coolies!... A Consul appears in the Square. It is not the natty Milner, but an elderly Briton, with a cane and a presence, who just now asks to be shown to Mr. Bingley.... The two talk softly for several minutes—a harsh interval for Routledge.

“I shall do what I can as promptly as possible, Mr. Bingley—trust me,” concludes the Consul, and his cane sounds upon the flags once more—diminuendo.

“Remember, I must be on my way at once,” the “Horse-killer” shouts after him.

Seven-twenty. Where was Milner?... Routledge wondered bitterly if the Gods of War had turned their faces from him at last. A low laugh from Bingley. Milner was crossing the Square hastily, but did not approach the garrison—instead was admitted to the big building occupied by the Japanese headquarters.

“God, I’d hate to have to depend upon an American Consul at a time like this,” is heard from the “Horse-killer.”

Routledge’s nerve was taxed to smile at this.... Seven-thirty. Consul Milner reappears in the Square, this time followed by two Japanese officers of rank.... Routledge’s door is unlocked, and he is called out into the hall.

“This is the gentleman—and I’ll vouch for him.” Milner observes, holding out his hand to Routledge. “Weed, my boy, how are you? Missed the train last night at Yopanga, I suppose, and came down the river. Didn’t you know we’re a closed port down here?”

“Yes, but I knew you were here, Consul. The battle’s on at Liaoyang, I understand.”

The eyes of the men managed to meet. The Japanese officers bowed politely, and the two Americans left the garrison.... Bingley’s voice is loudly upraised. The Japanese officers politely inform him that the order for his release has not yet reached them.

“Milner,” said Routledge, “would it complicate matters if I fell upon your neck and wept?”

“Wait till we catch the train, Weed. That’s what you want, isn’t it?” the Consul whispered.

“Badly.”

“So I concluded when I got the slip from you. That’s why I went to headquarters to fix things before coming here—saved a few minutes. Also I told my Chino to get up the carriage. It’ll be ready.... Our British friend will have to get his business transacted at once or he won’t get off for Shanhaikwan this morning.... Great God, Weed, did you get the battle—any of it?”

“I was with the left wing all day yesterday, Consul—it seems like a month ago. Oku was beating his brains out against the Russian intrenchments.”

They were crossing the Square. Bingley’s voice reached them: “Oh, I say, American Consul, prod up my man a bit—won’t you?”

The agonized face behind the bars took the edge off his own success to Routledge. He knew what these moments meant to the “Horse-killer.”

“Unfortunately, I’m not on speaking terms with the British Consul,” Milner observed lightly to Routledge, as they hurried to the carriage.

“I take it that Kuroki has crossed the Taitse—what have you heard?” Routledge inquired quickly.

“Just that much,” Milner replied. “The Japanese here say that Oyama will enter the city to-day. Kuroki pontooned the river two days ago. What you saw was the terrific effort of the Japanese to hold the bulk of the Russian army in the city and below while Kuroki flanked.”

“Exactly. I’m doing the story on those lines. I’ll be in Shanhaikwan to-night. You’ll get the decision to-day probably—wire me anywhere along the route, Consul?”

“Of course.”

“The World-News will get you Tokyo for your next post,” Routledge said with a laugh. “All I need is the single sentence—‘Oyama wins’ or ‘Oyama loses.’ By the way, the Japanese have got two good horses of mine——”

“I’ll see to them.”

The carriage reached the station at two minutes before eight.

“It looks as if you had it all your own way, Weed,” Milner observed with a laugh. “God! you’ve got the world at your feet—the greatest newspaper chance in years. You’ll give ’em a story that will rip up the States. Show ’em pictures—never mind the featureless skeleton—show ’em pictures, Weed!”

“I’ll try, Consul,” said Routledge, with feeling.

The station-boys were clanging their bells. The eyes of both men were fixed upon a clot of dust far down the road.

“Weed, my boy,” said Milner excitedly, “the race isn’t won yet. Your rival is going to make the train.”

The huge figure of the “Horse-killer” was sprinting toward them, less than two hundred yards away.

“So I observe,” said Routledge. “You’ll have to give me one more lift, Consul. A man who can run like that will be rather hard to beat over the half-mile course from the train to the cable-office in Shanhaikwan at seven to-night. Wire Borden, the American Combined Press man there, to arrange for me at the cable-office, and to meet me when the train pulls in to-night, with the fastest saddle-horse in Shanhaikwan—none but the fastest will do. I’ll win the half-mile!”

The train was leaving the station. Bingley caught the railing of the first-class coach, swung on, and staggered by Routledge into the car. Milner signified with a final gesture that he would look after the rights of America and the World-News. Bingley, panting hoarsely, was stretched out in his compartment when the American entered. He did not look up, and no word passed between them. For a moment Routledge hoped it might be different—that day might bring to him something of the life or death of Jerry Cardinegh. As the alleged author of the Indian treachery, he could not bring himself to seek the other’s notice. He wondered if Bingley had used the crime charged against him, to hold him in Wangcheng. This would have been natural; certainly he had whispered to the British Consul in the garrison. At all events, the swiftness of Milner’s efforts in his behalf had killed the result of such an intent. Routledge fell asleep. It was after ten when he awoke.

The “Horse-killer” was writing steadily, swiftly, fighting sleep, his eyes cocked open like a stuffed bird’s, and referring often to a carefully crowded note-book, the like of which he had carried in India.... Routledge started on his story. An hour’s sleep had quieted his brain a trifle. Before, his thoughts had darted about, like tumbler pigeons at play—in that queer light fashion of extreme fatigue. With the structure placed, he began to spend the great coiled chronicle at a swift, steady pressure. For the first time in his life he turned loose all that he had for a newspaper. The hurl of power glorified him for the time—work’s chaste and lofty joy—until he was beyond misery or any earthly evil. Without thinking, he turned to Bingley at last:

“We both want the free cable at Shanhaikwan,” he said briefly. “One of us will reach it first. It might be well to arrange for the winner to turn over the wire—at the end of, say, two hours—then both London and New York would have the story in the morning.”

“No,” said the “Horse-killer” coldly. “I shall put on whole story at once, and there will be five columns or more of it.”

Routledge laughed inwardly, surprised at himself for speaking, and just a little appalled at the grim nerve of the other. In the great glow from his work, he had followed a generous impulse to give Bingley and the Thames a chance that night—on the basis of his meeting a man at Shanhaikwan, with the best horse in the town. In the emancipation of high expression, the sense of rivalry had been lost, and he saw that Bingley was entitled to no little consideration, even if he were beaten by a nose to the cable-door. Routledge went on with his work, his compunctions eased.

At Koupangtze, the half-way station, there was a stop for ten minutes. Bingley improved the time by close conversation with an Englishman on the station platform. Routledge, who remained in his compartment, wondered with animation, as Bingley passed the other a sum of money, if he were arranging with the Englishman to telegraph for a horse to meet him at the train in Shanhaikwan. Could there be two fastest horses at the end of the run?

All that afternoon, as they crossed the brownest, most level and ancient country on earth, two correspondents toiled with words and a battle. At the little town of Shenkau, Routledge heard the name of “Weed” called in a laughable intonation by a Chinese boy on the platform. He reached out and took the telegram. Milner had not allowed a single sentence to suffice. Here is the message:

Oyama entered Liaoyang to-day. Russians in flight to Mukden. Russian rear-guard still fighting. Flanking movement successful. Show ’em pictures.

The gods of war had been good to him, indeed. He ran the telegram entire, at the head of his story. An hour later the Great Wall appeared to his tired eyes. His capacity to express or thrill at a thought was utterly gone. Every film of the battle which his brain had caught, all that he had desired to say, had been re-done in pencil. He folded the sheets and put them away with his credentials and cable-frank. The early twilight was soft and warm. The Great Wall cast a long shadow as the train passed through its single break. The sea was gilded and crimson-touched with the sunset. Shanhaikwan station is but a half-mile from the Wall. Already huts and burial-mounds were passed—dull brown in the dusk.... They were in a free land now; the zone of war and censorship lay behind. It was a dramatic moment.

Each correspondent arose. Each correspondent glanced at the heels of the other and found spurs!

Bingley made his way toward the rear-platform; Routledge took the other. Leaning far out, as the train pulled into the station, Routledge saw Borden and the black stallion—hopped off and ran to him. A China-boy holding the nervous, prick-eared mount stood beside the Combined Press man. Routledge leaped into the saddle. With the tail of his eye he saw Bingley rushing along the platform toward a gray mount.

“They’re looking for you at the cable-office,” Borden yelled. “Don’t burn out the wire!”

Half of Europe and a touch of Asia were represented in the faces on the platform. Meeting the night-train was the chief of the day’s social obligations in Shanhaikwan. To-night everybody was down to get the last fresh word from the field. The crowd sensed distantly that rival correspondents had come in, and that a great newspaper race was on, from the platform to the cable-office.... Spurring across the sandy station-yard, the heart of Routledge lifted to the splendid spirit of the game. He glanced around at the beating hoofs behind. Bingley was straining forward in the saddle, furiously rowelling his gray.... Above the cheering, Routledge heard his name called, and the face of Talliaferro appeared in the crowd, blurred as in a dream. Then came a voice that incited all his senses.... He did not see her. He thought it was in his soul.

“Routledge-san! Win—ride to win!” Then a trailing “Routledge ... san!”

The Hate of London was not in the face of Talliaferro.... As he rode, the heavenly lifting of the moment almost pulled him out of the race at hand.... “Win—ride to win!... Routledge-san!”... He spurred. The black answered. Veritably, he was a night-streak whirring cableward.... Routledge knew every step of the way. The day would have been lost, were he forced to halt for direction.... Past the Rest House, through the mud-hut quarter, breaking a detachment of Sikh infantry, he led the race—Bingley, unable to gain, back in the shadows, shouting, rowelling!

There was some meaning to his words, but Routledge did not think of them, until the gun-talk.... One shot stood out by itself—and four followed.... The black sprawled.... Routledge found himself coughing, but cleared grandly from the fallen mount, and crossed the threshold of the cable-office. He realized that he had fallen with the mount, but it made no impression. His hands were bleeding. He met the dust full-length. He knew that he staggered a bit as the operator leaped over the counter and caught him in his arms....

“I’m Weed of the World-News.... Borden arranged for me. Here’s the copy, credentials, cable-permit.”

“I’ve been waiting for you, Weed.... You’re shot—my God!”

Bingley entered, his face terrible but frightened. He glanced at the man who had beaten him—from head to foot.... Routledge was leaning against the counter, his clothing caked with dust, a laugh on his face, dripping blood from a wound under his coat.

“I didn’t mean to hit you—I tried to get your horse!” Bingley gasped.

“You did. Go out and finish him.... You’re not much of a shot from the saddle—or perhaps you lost your nerve, Bingley.... Any way, I am long over-due for a wound.... Get a surgeon. I’m hard-hit. Hurry!”

Routledge dropped forward on the counter, closing his eyes. Bingley disappeared. The operator was unfastening his clothes.

“Don’t mind me—until the doctor comes—but start my stuff going.... By the way, in a couple of hours, if it goes steadily, break in on my stuff and give Bingley a head-line in the Thames to-morrow. He only meant to get my horse—I see that. A man takes liberty in shooting a horse from under another—but never mind. There’s always room for two at the top!”

“He was shot from behind—a bad wound, but not necessarily a fatal one.... It hit him under the right-shoulder-blade,” the doctor was saying.

Routledge felt choky and very tired. His consciousness wavered back and forth like the throw of wind under a punkah when the coolies are fresh.... There was a light running step outside.... He was to go down close to the Gates with a lock on his lips.... His lips were tightened. First of all, there was a sweet breath of wind, like one of the best memories of early life.... He wanted to rub his eyes, but the surgeon held his hands.... Noreen’s voice was quick and tragic. The word “die” was uttered.

“No,” the doctor repeated; “not necessarily a fatal wound. I’ve ordered a carriage. We’ll take him to the Rest House.”

Noreen—the Leper Valley—the Russian music—the Shanghai Bund—Charing Cross—the carriage—the hovel in Rydamphur—the night in Bookstalls—Noreen—that he must be silent in delirium—these were the waves of consciousness.... He felt her hand, her lips, upon his brow. Even if it were just a vision, he wanted to welcome her with a smile, but his lips were locked.

“Oh, you martyr—you blessed martyr!... Don’t you know me, Routledge-san?”

“Is it true, Noreen? Are you here?”

“With you always, beloved.”

A frown fell upon his face. “I just came in from Liaoyang for the cable. It isn’t good for you to be with me.”

“My Master—don’t you know Father is dead, and that he was sane to confess at the last?... Feeney and Finacune were there.”

The eyes of Routledge found her.

“Just a minute, doctor,—I must say this.... Noreen, don’t speak of it again—the others need not know! Your father was the best and bravest of our breed——”

“Strongheart!... London knows; Tokyo knows; every British correspondent cabled it to his paper that night, months ago; there are crowns of vine-leaves for you in the heart of every friend of yours; the Secret Service knows——”

“But your good name, Noreen——” he faltered.

“My name is Routledge for eternity,” she answered, and the famous eyes bent to lull him.... “Sleep, my lover, sleep.... I shall always be with you now!”

TWENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER
THE GREAT FRIEZE COAT AND THE WOMAN JOURNEY DOWN THE COAST OF CHINA TOGETHER, AND CROSS INDIA TO THE LEPER VALLEY

No one hurried a destroyer after this torpedo of a man, the “Horse-killer.” Now and then a Bingley bullet, when it is not aimed too accurately, gives a tired man a rest which his energy would not permit by any less drastic measure. Certain heroic temperaments must needs receive a jolt every little while to force them to lie down.

There are two kinds of men in the world—those who have a sense of brotherhood, and those whose every thought is an explosion designed to increase their own personal impetus. The one makes war; the other peace. Perhaps the ultimate relation between the two is suggested in the race for the cable—and its result.

Routledge healed in a month, and incidentally found his first rest in years. Noreen was with him—a tremendous thing. The two had been long apart, pent and hungering.... Meanwhile, the world read and commented upon the great story of Liaoyang. Bingley’s story led in London.

On their last day in Shanhaikwan, they walked along the Wall—Routledge and Noreen—and that night were together in the Yellow Sea. The ship was the Tung Shing, a little steamer that breasted the waves in her own way, but quite correctly. So clean and clever was she, that everyone was refreshed. There were no distractions, nor counter-attractions, and every night-view was beautiful. The loom of the Wu Tung light was over the shoulder of the East, and a cliff to avoid on the starboard. A rising wind decided not to bother, and boomed away north, before the near sea was aroused to a fit of temper.

Routledge was so happy that he did not care for utterance. Noreen drank the chill breeze in silence for a long time. Once she placed her hand upon the sleeve of the great frieze coat.... Thus they sailed down the variegated and populous coast of China—a different breath from every big and little harbor. Noreen caught them all and was glad, divining far at sea the places she had tarried, but Routledge was Asia and countless continents to her. One night when only the pilot and the ship-lights and themselves were burning, the thought came to embrace—but they refrained.

Presently they were down to Singapore; then across to Calcutta, where the Ganges opens her mighty throats to the sea; then up by devious travels—to catch the breath of the Hills after the Heats. Morning and nightfall, Routledge looked down into Noreen’s eyes and found his world. Night-winds of India soothed them, though apart. And they had their thoughts of the day’s travel together.

At length, up over the crest of the world in their wanderings, they looked, from the amethyst Himalayas, down upon that strange dead civilization of China, a vista for eagles. Tight in the heart of it was the Leper Valley.

This is reached by one of the lost trails of the world. A few gallant explorers have picked the way, but failed to publish since the people would think such a report a fiction, and their reputations for veracity be broken. Traders pass the rim of the gap regularly, but do not know it.

Routledge had learned it from a Sannyasi. The way is tortuous and a bit perilous, so he arranged for Noreen and himself to follow a party of traders. Among these men was a Boy. There was cleanness in his gray eye, and you could not think of taint and look at his cheeks so ruddy under the tan. The Boy searched Noreen’s face with the guilelessness of a child and the valor of a man. When he rode beside her, the air that she breathed was new.

Of course the saddle was torture to her, a cumulative torture with the hours, but it was only physical, and night bore down with the sleep of healing, from the twilight of evening to the twilight of dawn. The journey melted into a strange composite of cool mountain winds; brief, warm showers which released the fragrance of the valleys; humans in dim doors and upon the highways, held, as they passed, in tableaux of freezing horror—suffering, sunlight, sleep. And always ancient China unfolded greater vistas of hills, fields, huts, and glowering yellow faces; and always the Boy walked beside and served—a ragged chaperon.

Routledge would smile on his way and note the large relation. The traders, too, were respectful—brave men whom the Open had kept mainly pure. There is a curse upon a white man in Asia, if he relaxes.

Once the Boy said: “Don’t be afraid, lady. This is the sleepiest part of China. Any way, I would take care of you.”

Routledge bent over from his mount and patted the Boy’s shoulder.

They parted by the wayside with a smile—the Boy and Noreen. She proffered him her purse, but he answered:

“I don’t want that. But any time I can help you—hail out! What are you going to do—stopping off here?”

She threw a kiss to him, but did not answer. The traders were far ahead, and the Boy turned his back.

“The world has gone,” Noreen said, after they had walked long through a tangled way. “Look below.”

“Yes—the Leper Valley—our bravest man!”

It was mid-afternoon. Routledge paused at the verge of a steep declivity, and they saw a radiant hollow evenly rimmed by mountains on every side. A lake gleamed at the bottom of this finger-bowl of the Gods, and moist tropical perfumes were borne softly upward with a far sound of bells—faint as the tinkle of drops of water falling upon thin metal.

And together they went down into the fragrance. Noreen could feel her heart; she could feel her soul; and too there was an enchanting beauty in this delve of the world. It sustained. It was so wonderful—like a child laughing alone in paradise! There was a sound of chimes in the vast silence, and God seemed to speak above.

The thatches below were trimmed and even. There were spaces between them, and from the heights these spaces had the clean look of a brown polished floor. There was depth and purity in the green of the lake, and the little temple, in the midst of its gardens, was white as Truth.

They were in a swept and shaded village. The woman was walking swiftly, her lips parted, her eyes feverishly bright. Routledge laughed quietly at her ardor to see the man whom his heart knew to be there and always waiting. The huts seemed deserted, except for those who could not leave.

A voice reached them at last—the voice that had echoed through the inner consciousness of each so long.... His back was toward them. The people upon the earth before him, they did not see—save as factors of the scene. Swiftly they moved forward now.

Rawder’s hand was raised in the sunlight. It was slender, nervously responsive to his emotion—but whole, whole! A little way off they halted, inspired by a glimpse of his profile.... It was the face of the man who had climbed to the roof of the world, lived through ice and flame; it was sun-darkened, storm-bitten, gaunt from suffering under the irons of self-repression, mystical in its manifestation of a cosmos within. It was the face of an exile who has felt the hate of man, the absence of women, and the Presence of God. And it was whole, whole.

He turned suddenly and saw the two standing together. There was something beautiful in his bewilderment, and in the expression of sadness which followed—since this was to be his last meeting with Routledge. A gesture, and the lowly ones were dismissed; and when the temple-court was empty, save for the Three—they joined hands.

Whispering, he led them into the temple gardens at the edge of the lake. The water was glorified in the sunset, and by the stones of his doorway the drowsy lilies drank the last rays. Magicians of ancient and wondrous patience had conserved the verdure and mastered the flowerings. There were none but flawless leaves and none but classic blooms. The pebbles on the shore had been touched into mosaics, and the vines which fixed the coolness in the stones of his dwelling had seemingly been guided into perfection by fingers in the night. Out of love his people served him; out of love they had charmed a fountain from the ground near his doorway; placed sounding-shells to lure music from the dropping water, and forced Emperor roses lavishly to arise and shelter and perfume his bathing-place.

“All these things my people have done for me, blessed friends,” Rawder said, “and all I asked when I came was to share a hut with the least of them.”

At the arbored doorway, he stepped aside and bowed their entrance. Far within a figure moved to and fro without a sound.

The perfection of the little home in the gardens of the temple was like singing in the hearts of the lovers.... As they entered, the Name, marvellously intoned, reached them from the figure which had moved but a moment before, but they could not see clearly in the dim twilight. When the candles were brought, Routledge found that it was Sekar, the Hindu Master. So ancient and withered was he, that his sitting erect on a mat of kusa grass seemed a miracle.

Rawder served them with food and drink; and afterward, outside, the Three talked long at the edge of the fountain. Always, from within, they heard the ineffable syllable, OM, at intervals, like a distant sound of the sea on a rocky beach. From the huts of the afflicted there was steady silence.

At last the meditation was broken, and they heard quaveringly from Sekar within these words in Tibetan. Rawder translated hastily:

“My son, my chela!... To-morrow we arise and ascend the goodly mountains to our Long Home. We are very weary, and I have seen that our work is finished here.”

The Three entered. Sekar beheld them. After a moment, Sekar spoke:

“And this is the friend of my chela; and this, the woman?”

Rawder bowed.

“To-morrow, in the first light,” the Hindu said fervently, “my chela and I depart for the Hills where the Snows are—where none may follow. And you, man and woman, go back to the world.”

Noreen turned a quick glance from Routledge to Rawder. “Ask him,” she said swiftly to the latter, “if there is not a great work for us to do here in the Leper Valley!”

The face of the bravest man was frightened, ghastly, as he interpreted. The eyes of Routledge were fixed upon the woman as never before.

“No,” the Hindu said. “We have left our disciples here among the Chinese. The Valley will be sweetened by them. You, man and woman, have a greater work in the world, as my chela and I have a greater work—far above the world!”

Deep into the night the Three listened to the music of the fountain, in the pure ardor of the lilies; and there was a moment in which Rawder wept.... In the full light of morning, the Four were at the parting of their ways.

“Remember,” said the bravest man, “always, to you both, whom I have had the joy to make One, goes out constantly—the dearest of my heart—from the Hills or from the Stars!”

Routledge and Noreen watched, as he helped his Master—until the two were lost in the winding, rising trail. Then they looked down, a last time, upon the silence and sunrise which brooded upon the Leper Valley.

END.

FOOTNOTE:

[A] This was in 1902. Mr. Olcott has since died.

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Sunset Trail, The. By Alfred Henry Lewis.
Sword of the Old Frontier, A. By Randall Parrish.
Tales of Sherlock Holmes. By A. Conan Doyle.
That Printer of Udell’s. By Harold Bell Wright.
Throwback, The. By Alfred Henry Lewis.
Trail of the Sword, The. By Gilbert Parker.
Treasure of Heaven, The. By Marie Corelli.
Two Vanrevels, The. By Booth Tarkington.
Up From Slavery. By Booker T. Washington.
Vashti. By Augusta Evans Wilson.
Viper of Milan, The (original edition). By Marjorie Bowen.
Voice of the People, The. By Ellen Glasgow.
Wheel of Life, The. By Ellen Glasgow.
When Wilderness Was King. By Randall Parrish.
Where the Trail Divides. By Will Lillibridge.
Woman in Grey, A. By Mrs. C. N. Williamson.
Woman in the Alcove, The. By Anna Katharine Green.
Younger Set, The. By Robert W. Chambers.
The Weavers. By Gilbert Parker.
The Little Brown Jug at Kildare. By Meredith Nicholson.
The Prisoners of Chance. By Randall Parrish.
My Lady of Cleve. By Percy J. Hartley.
Loaded Dice. By Ellery H. Clark.
Get Rich Quick Wallingford. By George Randolph Chester.
The Orphan. By Clarence Mulford.
A Gentleman of France. By Stanley J. Weyman.

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Table of Contents

- Routledge Rides Alone
- Contents
- PROLOGUE IN CHEER STREET, LONDON

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

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

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

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

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

- SIXTH CHAPTER A GRIM AND TERRIBLE TRADITION IS TOUCHED UPON FOR THE RELATION IT BEARS TO THE TREACHERY IN INDIA

- SEVENTH CHAPTER ROUTLEDGE BEGS FOR A STIMULANT—THE STUFF THAT SINGS IN THE VEINS OF KINGS

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

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

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

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

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

- THIRTEENTH CHAPTER JERRY CARDINEGH OFFERS A TOAST TO THE OUTCAST—A TOAST HE IS COMPELLED TO DRINK ALONE

- FOURTEENTH CHAPTER ROUTLEDGE IS ASSURED OF A WOMAN’S LOVE—THOUGH HE SHOULD LEAD THE ARMIES OF THE WORLD TO BURN LONDON

- FIFTEENTH CHAPTER NOREEN CARDINEGH APPEARS AFTER MIDNIGHT IN THE BILLIARD-ROOM OF THE IMPERIAL—AN INEFFABLE REMEMBRANCE

- SIXTEENTH CHAPTER CERTAIN CIVILIANS SIT TIGHT WITH KUROKI, WHILE THE BLOOD-FLOWER PUTS FORTH HER BRIGHT LITTLE BUDS

- SEVENTEENTH CHAPTER FEENEY AND FINACUNE ARE PRIVILEGED TO “READ THE FIERY GOSPEL WRIT IN BURNISHED ROWS OF STEEL”

- EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER BINGLEY BREAKS AWAY FROM THE CAMP OF THE CIVILIANS TO WATCH “THE LEAN-LOCKED RANKS GO ROARING DOWN TO DIE”

- NINETEENTH CHAPTER NOREEN CARDINEGH, ENTERING A JAPANESE HOUSE AT EVENTIDE, IS CONFRONTED BY THE VISIBLE THOUGHT-FORM OF HER LOVER

- TWENTIETH CHAPTER ROUTLEDGE IS SEEN BY NOREEN CARDINEGH, BUT AT AN EXCITING MOMENT IN WHICH SHE DARE NOT CALL HIS NAME

- TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER ROUTLEDGE, BROODING UPON THE MIGHTY SPECTACLE OF A JAPANESE BIVOUAC, TRACES A WORLD-WAR TO THE LEAK IN ONE MAN’S BRAIN

- TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER ROUTLEDGE STRIKES A CONTRAST BETWEEN THE JAPANESE EMPEROR AND THE JAPANESE FIGHTING-MAN, WHILE OKU CHARGES INTO A BLIZZARD OF STEEL

- TWENTY-THIRD CHAPTER ROUTLEDGE ENCOUNTERS THE “HORSE-KILLER” ON THE FIELD OF LIAOYANG, AND THEY RACE FOR THE UNCENSORED CABLE AT SHANHAIKWAN

- TWENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER THE GREAT FRIEZE COAT AND THE WOMAN JOURNEY DOWN THE COAST OF CHINA TOGETHER, AND CROSS INDIA TO THE LEPER VALLEY

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