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.”