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 “_Bes_sant” 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----”