Part 16
“Hell!” he snapped viciously. “Those trenches are abandoned. Kuropatkin might as well be cooling his toes in Lake Baikal for all Nodzu will find there, and he’s rushing as if----”
At this instant the Russian works were rubbed out of vision in a burst of white smoke, and the sound of Russian bullets was like the swooping of ten thousand night-hawks.... A terrific crash, a blast of dust, burnt powder, filings, sickening gases--and that which a moment ago was a dashing young captain with upraised sword was now wet rags and dripping fragments of pulp.
“Shrapnel,” said Bingley. “He’s happy now. He was playing to a gallery of Samurai saints--that little officer.... Nervy devils all--never doubt it.... But we’re walloped--walloped sure as hell. We can never take those works.”
The position of the enemy was now obscured by trembling terraces of white smoke, out of which poured countless streams of death, literally spraying Nodzu’s command, as firemen play their torrents upon a burning building. A rat couldn’t have lived out a full minute in the base of that valley. The Japanese left a terrible tribute, but the few sped on and upward to the first line of Russian entrenchments. A peculiar memory recurred to Bingley. Once in London he had seen a runaway team of huge grays attached to a loaded coal-cart. The tailboard of the cart jarred loose, and the contents streamed out behind as the horses ran. So the hard-hit streamed out from the Japanese charge as it passed over the base of the valley.
Even as the maddest of the Japanese survivors were about to flood over the first embankment, it was fringed with bayonets as a wall with broken glass; and along the length of the next higher trenches shot a ragged ring of smoke--clots of white strung like pearls.... As a train boring into a mountain is stopped, so was Nodzu’s brown swarm halted, lifted, and hurled back.
“The little brown dogs!” observed Bingley with joyful amazement. “Why, they’d keep the British army busy!... And they smile, dam’ ’em--they smile!”
This last referred to the dead and wounded which the hospital corps was now bringing back.... From out of the welter, a new charge formed and failed. Again--even Bingley was shaken by the slaughter and his organs stuck together--Nodzu hurled a third torrent of the Samurai up that unconquerable roll of earth. It curled like a feather in a flame, diminished, and faltered back....
The day was ending--Bingley’s gorgeous, memorable day. He had travelled twenty-five miles on foot; he had caught up with the Japanese army after five months in the field; he had seen Nodzu charge and Zurubaieff hold; he had seen the wounded who would not cry, and the dead who would not frown.
The whole was a veritable disease in his veins. The day had burned, devoured him. He was tired enough to sleep in a tree, chilled from spent energy; so hungry that he could have eaten horn or hoof; but over all he was mastered by the thought of Bingley and his work--the free cable, the story, the _Thames_, the battle, Bingley, the first and greatest story, acclaim of the world, the world by the horns! So his brain ran, and far back in his brain the films of carnage were sorted, filed, and labelled--living, wounded, dead; the voices of the Japanese as they ran, Russian-pits from which death spread, shrapnel emplacements which exploded hell; barbed entanglements spitting the Japanese for leisure-slaying, as the butcher-bird hangs up its living meat to keep it fresh for the hunger-time; the long, quick-moving, burnished guns that caught the sun, when the smoke cleared, and reflected it like a burning-glass--such were the details of the hideous panorama in Bingley’s brain.
The chief of his troubles was that Liaoyang still held. He had always laughed at the Russians, and looked forward to the time when he should watch the British beat them back forever from India. The valor of the stolid, ox-like holding angered him now. Suppose Liaoyang should not be taken! It would spoil his story and hold him in the field longer than he cared to stay. He had but scant provisions for two days. He planned to be off for the free cable to-morrow night.
“It’s going to rain,” he gasped, as he let himself down at nightfall into his ravine. He heard the nicker of the horse below. It did not come to him with any spirit of welcome, for Bingley was sufficient unto himself, but with the thought that he must keep the beast alive for the race to the cable after the battle.
“Yes, it’s going to rain,” he repeated. “You can count on rain after artillery like to-day.... Living God! I thought I knew war before, but it was all sparrow-squabbling until to-day!”
He found his saddle-bags safely in the _cache_ where he had left them--this with a gulp of joy, for the little food he had was in them. Crackers, sardines, a drink of brandy that set his empty organism to drumming like a partridge. It also whetted his appetite to a paring edge, but he spared his ration and smoked his hunger away. Then in the last drab of day, and in the rain, he cut grasses and branches, piling them within the reach of his horse. A stream of water began to trickle presently down the rocks when the shower broke. Bingley drank deeply, and caught many _ponchos_ full afterward for his mount. Later he fell asleep, shivering, and dreamed that the devil was lashing the world’s people--a nation at a time--into pits of incandescence. The savagery of the dream aroused him, and he became conscious of a strangeness in his ears. It was the _silence_, and it pained like rarefied air. Wet, stiffened, deathly cold, he fell asleep again.
The next day, the thirty-first, and the worst of the battle, Bingley curved about Oku’s rear to the railroad which marked for him a short cut to the outer world. Another, that day, watched Oku closely as he forced the Russian right wing to face the Japanese, but Bingley, even from a distance, was charged and maddened by the dynamics of the action....
Late in the afternoon, a little to the west of the railway, he stopped to finish his food and gather forage for his horse, when over the crest of a low hill appeared a tall human figure. The Japanese put no such giants in the field, and Bingley was startled by a certain familiarity of movement.
The man approached, a white man. Chill, weakness, and hatred welled suddenly in Bingley’s veins. He was not alone on the road to a free cable. The man he feared most in the world was entered in the race with him--the man he had seen last at the Army and Navy reception, and roughed and insulted, nearly three years before.
Routledge smiled, but spoke no word. Bingley regarded the strong, strange profile, haggard, darkened as a storm arena. He saddled savagely and rode after the other. It was fifty-five miles to Wangcheng, where he meant to catch the _Chinese Eastern_ for Shanhaikwan to-morrow morning--fifty-five miles in the dark, over rain-softened roads.
“Hell! he can’t make it on foot,” Bingley muttered. “I’ll beat him to the train.”
And yet he was angered and irritated with the reflection that the man ahead had never yet been beaten.
NINETEENTH CHAPTER
NOREEN CARDINEGH, ENTERING A JAPANESE HOUSE AT EVENTIDE, IS CONFRONTED BY THE VISIBLE THOUGHT-FORM OF HER LOVER
Noreen Cardinegh buried her father alone. At least, those besides herself who took any part in the last service for the famous correspondent were only Japanese hired for the manual labor. To the English who were still at the hotel, eager to assist the woman, and charged to do so by Feeney, Finacune, and Trollope before they left, the morning was sensational. In spite of the fact that scarcely any one had been admitted to the Cardinegh room for the past two days, Talliaferro and others had arranged for the funeral. They were abroad at nine o’clock in the morning, and found the formality over.... The Japanese clerk told them all. At her request, he had made arrangements with a Tokyo director of such affairs. The body had been taken out at dawn. Miss Cardinegh had followed in her rickshaw. A place had been secured in the Kameido gardens--very beautiful now in the cloud of cherry blossoms. She had preferred a Buddhist to a Shinto priest; refusing the services of an American or English missionary. The clerk explained that he was permitted to tell these things now.... Possibly Miss Cardinegh would see one or two of her friends at this time.... Yes, she was in her room.
* * * * *
“Come,” she said in a low trailing tone, in response to Talliaferro’s knock.
Noreen was sitting by the window. The big room had been put in order. The morning was very still. The woman was dry-eyed, but white as a flower. She held out her hand to Talliaferro and tried to smile.... Strangely, he thought of her that moment as one of the queens of the elder drama--a queen of stirring destiny, whose personal history was all interpenetrated with national life, and whom some pretender had caused to be imprisoned in a tower. This was like Talliaferro.
“We were all ready and so eager to help you, Miss Cardinegh,” he began. “You know, some of the older of the British correspondents have dared to feel a proprietary interest in all that concerns you. Why did you disappoint us so?”
“I did not want anything done for him--that would be done on my account,” she said slowly. “It was mine to do--as his heritage is mine. I only ask you to think--not that anything can extenuate--but I want you to think that it was not my father, but his madness.”
“We all understand that--even those who do not understand _all_ that happened.”
“The tragedy is the same.... Ah, God, how I wish all the fruits might be mine--not Japan’s, not Russia’s!”
He started to speak, to uproot from her mind this crippling conception, but she raised her hand.
“You cannot make me see it differently, Mr. Talliaferro,” she said tensely. “I have had much time to think--to see it all! You are very good--all of you. One thing, I pray you will do for me.”
“You have but to speak it, Miss Cardinegh.”
“When you take the field--all of you, wherever you go--watch and listen for any word of Mr. Routledge.... He may be the last to hear that he is vindicated. Follow any clue to find him. Tell him the truth--tell him to come to me!”
Peter Pellen’s “Excalibur” accepted the mission, declaring that he would faithfully impress it upon the others with the second army, shortly to leave; as Feeney and Finacune certainly would do with the first. And so he left her, one of the coldest and dryest men out of London; and yet, just now, he carried himself under a stiff curb, lest he forget his war....
“And that’s the end of the man who lowered the fluids in the British barometer, like a typhoon in the China Sea,” he observed in solitude. “And the Japanese buried him in the Kameido, in cherry-blossom time--buried him for money--the man who opened the veins of their Empire!”
The work all done, Noreen Cardinegh met the deluge. The elements had been forming for three days. She had sensed them vaguely in sudden shivers of dread. Her soul was bared now to the primal terror, the psychic terror, of the outcast, against which seasoned valor quails.... By the window, she sat dry-eyed, in the midst of her father’s possessions! From the street, over the hotel-gardens, came to her ears the screaming of children. Japanese schoolboys were passing, a procession of them. They were playing soldier--marching very erect and proudly, with sticks for guns.
“My father did this!”... Upon such a sentence the whole dreadful 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.