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.