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!