structure was built. Thoughts of her childhood had their significance
in the breaking of this horrid storm of war. Aye, and the little house
in Tyrone before her coming! It was there that the black shadow,
falling upon his country, crept into the brain of Jerry Cardinegh.
The shadow grew, was identified with her earliest memories. Into her
father’s mortal wound, inflicted by the passing of the sweetest woman,
the shadow had sunk with all its Tartarean blackness. She saw it all
now--the sinister, mysterious passion which had rivalled even his
love for her. The wars had deepened, blackened it. The last visit to
Ireland had turned it into hideous, tossing night. And this was the
beating storm--babes with sticks for guns, companies of soldiers in
the _Fukiage_, the wailing “Banzai Niphon” from Shimbashi station,
where the regiments entrained for the southern ports of mobilization;
and on the lower floor of the hotel, where still were gathering the
war-experts from all the earth.... The strength ran from her limbs, and
her heart cried out.
Japan, which she had loved, became like a haunted house to her; yet
she could not hope to find Routledge without some word concerning
him, and Tokyo was the natural base of her search operations. All the
correspondents going out with the different armies were pledged to
communicate with her any word they might receive regarding him. The
correspondents, unsecured to any of the four armies, and destined to
work from the outside--at Chifu, Newchwang, Chemulpo, Shanhaikwan or
Shanghai--even these had promised her a cable-flash at the sight of
Routledge. Through an agent in New York she learned that the name
“Routledge” was not attached for work in the Orient to any newspaper on
the Atlantic seaboard; still, by cable she subscribed for the chief
American newspapers. Tokyo was her address.
She could not stay longer at the Imperial, which had become a sort
of civilian war headquarters. All was war in its corridors. In the
_Minimasacuma-cho_ of the _Shiba_ district, she took a small house,
establishing herself in the native style, but she could not escape the
agony. Japan was burning with war-lust from end to end; whetted of
tooth, talon-fingered, blood-mad. Her fighting force, one of the most
formidable masses that ever formed on the planet’s curve, was landing
in Korea and Liaotung. What meant the battle of the Yalu to her; the
tragedy of the _Petropavlovsk_, sunk off the tip of the fortress
with Makaroff, the great Verestchagin, and five hundred officers and
men? Not a distant calamity of foreign powers, but _Tyrone_--_Shubar
Khan_--_Cardinegh_--_madness_--_treachery_. What meant the constant
tension of Tokyo, singing in her ears like wires stretched tight--like
the high-pitched, blood-hungry song of insects in the night? It meant
the work of her own blood, her own accursed heritage.... She was called
to the Imperial often for the mails, but she avoided the Englishmen
there, and admitted none to the little house in Shiba. Always, when
there were white men about, she fancied a whispering behind her; as,
indeed, there was--the whispers that are incited by the passing of an
exquisite woman.
In the early days following her father’s death, Noreen was besieged by
men who appeared suddenly, quietly--men unknown in Japan--who demanded
with seeming authority all the documents in her father’s effects which
pertained to the treachery in India. These were agents of the great
British secret service--men of mystery to all save those who threatened
England’s inner wall. Noreen gave all that they asked, convinced them
of her sincerity. They impressed upon her the needs of utter secrecy,
and assured her that the name of Routledge was being purified to the
farthest ends of the service. It was intimated, however, that this
would require much time; as, indeed, it had to fix the crime upon him.
These men worked but little with cables and mails.
So the wire-ends held her to Tokyo through Yalu and Nanshan to the
middle of June. She was returning from the Imperial at early evening
with a bundle of American newspapers. She knew by the hushed streets
that another battle was in progress; and she felt with the people
the dreadful tension of waiting, as she hurried swiftly along the
wide, dirt-paved Shiba road. Tokyo was all awake and ominously still.
A rickshaw-coolie darted out from a dark corner with his cart, and
accosted her in a low, persistent way. He wheeled his cart in front of
her, as he would not have dared with a native or a male foreigner--and
all in a silent, alien fashion. She could not sit still to ride--pushed
the rickshaw aside and sped on in the dusk. She was ill, her throat
parched with waiting, her face white with waiting. The founts of her
life were dry, her heart thralled with famine. Where was _he_ for this
new battle?... She passed knots of women in the streets. They talked
softly as she passed and laughed at her, held up their boy-babes
and laughed. She knew something of the language, and caught their
whispering--the laughing, child-like women of Japan, in whom transient
foreigners delight. They breathed world-conquest into the ears of their
men-children; and were more horrible far in their whispering and
laughing, to Noreen now, than tigresses yammering in the jungle-dark.
She faltered before the door of her house, afraid. The servants had not
yet lighted the lamps, and within it was darker than the street....
There, among the densest shadows, _he_ sat--there, by the covered easel
in a low chair. He was smiling at her, a white and a weary smile. His
long, thin hands were locked above his head; his lean limbs stretched
out in tired fashion, the puttee leggings worn dull from the saddle
fenders; his chest gaunt, the leather-belt pulled tight.
Noreen sank to her knees before the empty chair, her face, her arms,
in the seat where the mist of a man had been!... How long she remained
there she never knew; but it was some time before light when she was
aroused by a far, faint roar beating toward her, across the city. The
roar quickened, broke into a great, throbbing, coherent shout, and
swept by like a hurricane, leaving a city awake and thrown wide open
to exultation. The battle of Telissu had been won. Only defeats are
mourned in Japan, not the slain of a victory. Dawn broke, and Noreen
looked out on an altered Tokyo--loathsome to her as a gorging reptile.
* * * * *
“You are intensely psychic, Miss Cardinegh,” the English doctor said.
“This ‘vision,’ as you call it, means nothing in itself--that is, so
far as concerns the man you say you saw--but it signifies that you are
on the verge of a nervous break-down. You must cease all worry and
work, eat plenty of meat, and take long walks. It’s all nerves, just
nerves.”
“No, it does not mean that your lover is dead,” said Asia, through the
lips of the old Buddhist priest who had buried her father. “Such things
happen this way. He may have been sleeping, dreaming of you, when
the strength of your heart’s desire rose to the point of calling his
form-body to your house for an instant. It might have happened before
in the daylight, and you did not know--save that you felt restless
possibly, and filled with strange anguish. Had there been light, you
would not have seen him.”
“But,” she faltered, “I have heard at the moment of death--such things
happen----”
“Yes, but he did not need to die to be called to you.”
Yet she was deathly afraid. It had been the same after the night of
her dream in Cheer Street--the night that Routledge had slipped from a
noose in Madras. If Noreen had known that!... It is well that she did
not, for she could have borne but little more.
Further weeks ground by. Only in the sense that she did not die, Noreen
lived, moving about her little house, in daylight and lamp-light,
without words, but with many fears. She tried to paint a little in
those wonderful summer days--days of flashing light, and nights all
lit with divinity--but between her eyes and the canvas, films of
memory forever swung: Routledge-san in Cheer Street; in the golden
stillness of the Seville; the little Paris studio; in the carriage
from Bookstalls to Charing Cross; in the snowy twilight on the Bund in
Shanghai--yes, and the mist of the man here by the easel!... Always he
was with her, in her heart and in her mind.
Not a word concerning Routledge, from the least or greatest of the
men who had promised to watch for him! Often it came to her now that
he had either allied himself with the Russians or avoided the war
entirely. Could it be that he had already followed the prophecy which
Mr. Jasper had repeated for her, and gone to join Rawder a last time in
the Leper Valley?... No one in Japan had ever heard of the Leper Valley.
There was little mercy in the thought of him being with the Russians;
and yet such a service might have appealed to a man who desired to
remain apart from the English. If he were in Liaoyang or Mukden, there
was no hope of reaching him, until winter closed the campaign, at
least. Only a few hundred miles away, as the crow flies, and yet Mukden
and Liaoyang could be approached only from around the world. The valley
between two armies is impassable, indeed--unwired, untracked, and
watched so that a beetle cannot cross unseen.... The general receives
a dispatch at dawn containing the probable movements of the enemy for
this day. One of his spies in the hostile camp which faces him, less
than two miles away, has secured the information and sent it in--not
across the impassable valley, but around the world.... If Routledge had
known that the curse had been lifted from him, would he not have rushed
back to her? It seemed so, but with the Russians, he would have been
last to learn what had befallen.
Just once--and it marked the blackest hour of that black summer in
Japan--the thought flooded upon her that Routledge knew, but purposely
remained apart; that he was big enough to make the great sacrifice for
her, but not to return to the woman whose heritage, in turn, was the
Hate of London. That hour became a life-long memory, even though the
thought was whipped and shamed and beaten away.
It was late in July when certain sentences in an American newspaper
rose with a thrilling welcome to her eyes. There was an intimate
familiarity, even in the heading, which he might not have written,
but which reflected the movement and color of his work. It was in the
_World-News_ of New York, and signed “A. V. Weed.”... A rather long
feature cable dated at Chifu shortly after the battle of Nanshan. A
number of Russian prisoners had been taken by the Japanese, and with
them was a certain Major Volbars, said to be the premier swordsman
of the Russian Empire. The Japanese heard of his fame; and, as it
appears, became at once eager to learn if Russian civilization produced
sword-arms equal to those of her own Samurai. The prisoner was asked to
meet one Watanabe, a young infantry captain, and of that meeting the
_World-News_ published the following:
... Here was armistice, the nucleus of which was combat. There was
a smile upon the face of Watanabe, a snarling smile, for his lips
were drawn back, showing irregular teeth, glistening white. His
low brow was wrinkled and his close-cropped, bristling hair looked
dead-black in the vivid noon. The hilt of his slim blade was polished
like lacquer from the nimble hands of his Samurai fathers. This was
Watanabe of Satsuma, whose wrist was a dynamo and whose thrusts were
sparks. The devil looked out from his fighting-face.
Volbars compelled admiration--a conscienceless man, from his eyes,
but courageous. He was small, heavy-shouldered, and quick of
movement, with nervous eyes and hands. His left cheek was slashed
with many scars, and his head inclined slightly to the right, through
a certain muscular contraction of the neck or shoulder. This master
of the archaic art had the love of his soldiers.
“In the name of God, let him take the attack, Major!” Volbars’ second
whispered. “His style may disconcert you.”
The Russian waved the man away, and faced the Japanese swordsman.
His head seemed to lie upon his right shoulder, and his cruel,
sun-darkened face shone with joy. His thick, gleaming white arm
was bare. His blade, which had opened the veins of a half-hundred
Europeans, screamed like a witch as the master-hand tried it in thin
air.
The weapons touched. The styles of the antagonists were different,
but genius met genius on its own high ground. Each blade was a quiver
of arrows, each instant of survival due to devilish cunning or the
grace of God. In spite of his warning, Volbars took the attack and
forced it tigerishly. Some demon purpose was in his brain, for he
shot his volleys high. A marvelous minute passed, and a fountain of
crimson welled from Watanabe, where his neck and shoulder met. The
heavy breathing of the Russian was heard now back among his fellow
prisoners. The Japanese, sheeted with blood from his wound, defended
himself silently. He was younger, lighter, superbly conditioned.
The face of Volbars changed hideously. Sweat ran into his eyes, where
the desperation of fatigue was plain. His lips were stiff white
cords. Patches of grayish white shone in his cheeks and temples....
For a second his shoulders lifted; then an exultant gasp was heard
from his dry throat.
That which had been the left eye in the face of Watanabe burst like
a bubble and ran down. Yet not for the fraction of a second did the
Japanese lose his guard. Though a window of his throne-room was
broken, the kingdom of his courage still endured. The Russian second
heard his man gasp, “I’m spent. I can’t kill him!”
The grin upon the awful face of the One-eyed became more tense. He
seized the aggressive, and the Japanese lines greeted the change
with a high-strung, ripping shout. Watanabe bored in, stabbing like
a viper, his head twisted to spare his dark side. Volbars’ limbs
were stricken of power. He saw the end, as he was backed toward the
prisoners. A tuft of grass unsteadied him for a second--and the
Japanese lightning struck.
The sword of the Russian quivered to the earth and the master fell
upon it, his face against the ground, his naked sword-arm shaking,
the hand groping blindly for the faithless hilt. Watanabe bowed to
the prisoners, and walked unassisted back to his own roaring lines.
His seconds followed closely, one of them wiping the sword of the
Samurai with a wisp of grass.... It appears that Volbars had the
audacity to attempt to blind his opponent before killing him. It was
like the battle of the Yalu. Volbars, as did General Zassulitch,
looked too lightly on the foe....
“A. V. Weed”--what blessings fell upon the name that moment!... He
was not with the Russians! Not in the Leper Valley! A cable to the
_World-News_ that night brought a reply the next day, to the effect
that “A. V. Weed” had never been in touch with the office; that he
was the freest of free lances, and brought his messages from time
to time to one of the free cables outside the war-zone.... The free
cable nearest to Liaoyang--already granted to be the next scene of
conflict--was at Shanhaikwan, at the end of the Great Wall. Noreen
arranged for mail and dispatches to follow her, and went down the
Tokaido, overtaking at Nagasaki a ship which had sailed from Yokohama
three days before she left.
TWENTIETH CHAPTER
ROUTLEDGE IS SEEN BY NOREEN CARDINEGH, BUT AT AN EXCITING MOMENT IN
WHICH SHE DARE NOT CALL HIS NAME
Noreen breathed sweeter with the shores of Japan behind. The Pacific
liner, _Manchu_, was crossing the Yellow Sea for Shanghai. An evening
in early August, and the tropic breeze came over the moon-flecked
water, from the spicy archipelagoes below. It was late, and she was
sitting alone, forward on the promenade-deck. The thought thralled,
possessed her completely, that she was drawing nearer, nearer her
soul’s mate. Might it not be given to her to keep the covenant--to
find him, though all others had failed?... There was a high light over
Asia for her inner eye, this memorable night of her romance. The crush
of Japan was gone, and in the great hour of emancipation her love for
Routledge, hardiest of perennials, burst into a delicate glory of
blossoming--countless blooms of devotion, pure white; and in all honor
she could not deny--rare fragrant flowerings of passional crimson....
At Shanghai she sought the office of the _North China News_, to learn
what the war had done during her three days at sea. The Japanese armies
were panting--inside the passes which had recently protected Liaoyang.
Any day might begin the battle with which Japan intended forever to end
Russia’s hold in Liaotung peninsula. The _News_ stated blithely that
there was no doubt of the war being over by September.... There was
another story in the files of early August, and in the silent office
the woman bent long over the sheet, huge as a luncheon-cover. This
was an Indian exchange with a Simla mark. An English correspondent,
wandering somewhere in the Hills, had run across a white man
travelling with an old Hindu lama. A weird mad pair, the story said,
half-starving, but they asked no alms. Whither they were going, they
would not say, nor from whence they had come. The natives seemed to
understand the wanderers, and possibly filled the lama’s bowl. The
feet of the white man were bare and travel-bruised, his clothing a
motley of Hindu and Chinese garments. The article intimated that he
was a “gone-wrong missionary,” but its whole purport and excuse was to
point out the menace to British India from unattached white men, mad
or apparently mad, moving where they willed, in and out of restless
States, especially at such a time as now, when the activity of foreign
agents, etc., etc....
The article was rock-tight and bitter with the Dead Sea bitterness. The
pressure of the whole senile East was in it. The woman quivered from
a pain the prints had given her, and moved out of the darkened office
into the strange road, thick and yellow with heat.... Could this be
Rawder and his Hindu master?... It occurred to her suddenly that the
men of the newspaper might be able to tell her of the Leper Valley.
She turned back to the office, was admitted to the editor.... No, he
had not heard of the Leper Valley. There were leper colonies scattered
variously throughout the interior. It might be one of them.... She
thanked him and went away, leaving a problem to mystify many sleepy,
sultry days.... That night, Noreen engaged passage in a coasting
steamer for Tongu, and on the morning of the third day thereafter
boarded the Peking-Shanhaikwan train on the Chinese Eastern.
Alone in a first-class compartment, she watched the snaky furrows of
maize throughout seven eternities of daylight, until her eyes stung and
her brain revolted at the desolate, fenceless levels of sun-deadened
brown. Out of a pent and restless doze, at last she found that a
twilight film had cooled the distance; she beheld the sea on her right
hand, and before her the Great Wall--that gray welt on the Eastern
world, conceived centuries before the Christ, rising into the dim
mountains and jutting down into the sea. In an inexplicable moment of
mental abstraction, as the train drew up to Shanhaikwan, the soul of
the weary woman whispered to her that she had seen it all before.
At the Rest House, Noreen ventured to inquire of a certain agent of a
big British trading company if he knew any of the English or American
war-correspondents who had come recently to Shanhaikwan to file their
work on the uncensored cable. This man was an unlovely Englishman
poisoned by China and drink.... Oh, yes, some of the men had come in
from the field or from Wangcheng with big stories, but had trouble
getting back to their lines, it was said.
“Have you heard--or do you know--if Mr. Routledge has been here?”
His face filled with an added inflammation, and he mumbled something
which had to do with Routledge and the treachery in India.
“Do you mean to say,” she demanded hopelessly, “that you--that
Shanhaikwan has not heard that Mr. Routledge had nothing to do with the
treachery in India--that another, Cardinegh of the _Witness_, confessed
the crime on his death-bed?”
The Englishman had not heard. He bent toward her with a quick, aroused
look and wanted to know all, but she fled to her room.... It was not
strange if Routledge failed to hear of his vindication, when this
British agent had not.... By the open window she sat for hours staring
at the Great Wall in the moonlight. She saw it climb through the white
sheen which lay upon the mountains, and saw it dip into the twinkling
sea, like a monster that has crawled down to drink. There were
intervals when Shanhaikwan was still as the depths of the ocean. The
whole landscape frightened her with its intimate reality. The thought
came again that this had once been _her_ country, that she had seen the
Mongol builders murdered by the lash and the toil.
The purest substance of tragedy evolved in her brain. There had been
something abhorrent in contact with the Englishman below. She had seen
a hate for Routledge like that before--at the Army and Navy reception!
And then, the sinister narrative of the white man in India, as it had
been set down by the English correspondent!... Could this be “their
bravest man”? Was he, too, attracting hatred and suspicion in India, as
a result of the excitement into which her father’s work had thrown the
English? Could not poor Rawder, barefoot, travel-bruised, and wearing a
motley of native garments, be free from this world-havoc which was her
heritage?... That instant in the supremacy of pain she could not feel
in her heart that Routledge wanted her--or that he was in the world!...
Could he be dead, or in the Leper Valley? Had his mind gone back to
dust--burned out by these terrible currents of hatred?...
The pictured thought drew forth a stifled scream. The lamp in her
room was turned low, and the still, windless night was a pitiless
oppression. Crossing the room to open the door, in agony for air, she
passed the mirror and saw a dim reflection--white arms, white throat,
white face. She turned the knob.
The clink of glasses on a tin-tray reached her from below, with
the soft tread of a native servant; then from farther, the clink
of billiard-balls and a man’s voice, low but insinuating, its very
repression an added vileness:
“Dam’ me, but she was a stunning woman, a ripping woman--and out
after----”
She crashed the door shut and bolted it against the pestilence.... Had
the powers of evil this night consummated a heinous mockery to test
her soul, because her soul was strong?... In terror and agony, she
knelt by the open window. The Wall was still there, sleeping in the
moonlight--the biggest man-made thing in the world, and the quietest.
It steadied her, and the stuff of martyrs came back.
* * * * *
The man in charge of the cable-office in Shanhaikwan told her the
next morning that a correspondent who signed himself “A. V. Weed” had
brought in a long message for New York, just after the Yalu battle, but
had not tarried even a night in town. “A tall, haggard stranger with
a low voice,” the man described him.... There was little more to be
learned, but this was life to her, and the first tangible word, that he
lived, since her father’s death. Noreen spent the day walking alone on
the beaches and through the foreign concession.
From the top of the Wall in the afternoon, she stared down at the
little walled city which grew out of the great masonry. There she could
see a bit of living China--all its drones and workers and sections
and galleries, as in a glass bee-hive. Big thoughts took the breath
from her. Europe seemed young and tawdry beside this. She picked up
one of the loose stones--touched the hem of the Wall’s garment, as it
were--and again she had but to close her eyes and look back centuries
into the youth of time, when the Wall was building, to see the Mongols
swarming like ants over the raw, half-done thing.... There was a little
French garrison in the town; and the Sikh infantry, at target-practice
on the beach, brought India back. The day was not without fascination
to her relieved mind.
The evening train from Peking brought a white man who added to the
stability of Shanhaikwan--Talliaferro of the _Commonwealth_. The
dry little man was greatly disturbed in heart. He had deliberately
given up his place with Oku’s second army, choosing to miss the smoky
back-thresh of future actions in the field, in order to get what he
could out on the free cable. Peter Pellen’s “Excalibur,” credited with
acumen, flying and submarine, had broken under the Japanese pressure.
“Have you seen or heard of Mr. Routledge?” she whispered at dinner.