Part 5

“I’ll go to my state-room now,” she whispered. “There is only a little while to rest.... Good-night, Routledge-san. I’ll be abroad early.”

He knew that she would not have thought of her cabin yet, even though the hour was late, had it not been for the intrusion of the creaking chair. Routledge took her hand and spoke a brisk good-night. Returning to the deck-chair between the air-shafts, he sat down and arose again carefully. The sound was the same. He tested the chair thoroughly and found that in no possible way could the wind have caused the creak.... They had stood long within eight or nine feet of the chair. A gentleman would have given some notice that he was within hearing, or, better still, would have gone his way--unless asleep. This last was unlikely, because the deck was searched by a keen winter wind. In the smoking-room was an individual whose face had become familiar to Routledge since he had taken the Paris train at Marseilles the night before--a middle-aged man, strongly featured, wearing a white mustache. This traveller had also stopped at the Seville. He glanced up from a game of solitaire as Routledge entered. There were a bridge-party and one or two others in the apartment. Routledge chose a cigar very carefully, and managed to whisper to the attendant in a light, humorous way:

“Let me look at that cordial-flask a moment, and tell me how long that man at solitaire has been here.”

The other handed him the package and whispered, “Just about five minutes.”

Routledge purchased the cordial and passed out. It happened that he glanced into the smoking-room through a half-curtained window, and met the eyes of the White Mustache fully.... It was a little thing--scarcely a coincidence--for one to cross France by the same stages in twenty-four hours and break the journey at the same hotel in Paris. Moreover, because the stranger was not in the smoking-room fifteen minutes before did not establish the fact that it was his weight that had made the chair creak.... Routledge was disinclined to rest. The day had revolutionized his systems of being. He longed for daylight again, quite forgetting his usual patience with the natural passing of hours and events. The day itself had been unspeakably fine, but there was a disturbing reaction now and a premonitive shadow that would not be smoked nor reasoned out of mind.

This, on the night of his perfect day. Noreen Cardinegh had given him every moment of her time in Paris, not even saying good-by to her friends.... It was not the mystery in India; not the swift failing of Jerry Cardinegh, which his daughter felt, though she had not seen; not the White Mustache nor the creaking chair--these merely wove into a garment of nettles. The premonition was not even his own. It was Noreen Cardinegh’s, and had to do with his leaving her and hurrying back to India.... “It has come to me, Routledge-san, that you are to go very quickly!”... The great frieze coat was wet with Channel mists and Channel spray when the half-dawn developed the Dover pier, and the eyes of the wanderer were filled once more with the seven shades of English gray.... Noreen was out before the full day.

“Let’s take the earlier train for Charing Cross,” she said. “I believe we still have time. Our luggage is checked through, and we can breakfast _en route_.”

He brought his bag, and Noreen took his arm companionably as he appeared on the main-deck again.... She was all in gray like the morning, save for a touch of yellow ruching at her throat and her hair’s golden wonder-work.... Routledge turned on the pier at a step behind. It was the White Mustache in light-travelling order, hastening to make the early train.

A breakfast-table was between them. “Routledge-san,” she said, leaning toward him critically, “you don’t look the least bit tired, but I doubt if you’ve slept since I left you. Beside, your coat is all wet.”

“I did smell the Channel a bit,” he replied, thinking that a man who looked dull and worn in the presence of Noreen Cardinegh would be incapable of reflecting light of any kind. “I couldn’t? feel more fit and keep my self-control. Though I am not an Englishman, it thrills to see England again.” He glanced from his plate to her eyes and then out upon the winter fields, sweeping by the window like an endless magic carpet. “Some time, when there are no more wars,” he added, “we shall write an essay and call it, ‘Grape-fruit and Kentish Gardens.’”

They separated at Charing Cross, to meet again in the evening at the Army and Navy reception. Routledge repaired to his old lodgings in Bookstalls Road and sat down before his grate-fire in the midst of old trophies and treasures. Bookstalls was a crowded part of London, rushing with many small businesses, and convenient to vast tracts of unbroken undesirability. It was a gorge that boomed continual clamor. Even at night, when the protest from the cobble-stones should have sunk to its stillest, the neighboring fire-department was wont to burst open at intervals like the door of a cuckoo-clock and pour forth tons of clangorous polished metal. Whistles from the far river whipped the smoky air when the small factories were at peace; night-shifts of workmen kept the pavements continually animate. There was an iron-tongued guard in the belfry of Old Timothy’s Church that never let an hour go by without brutally hammering it flat, and then bisecting it; and on Sundays and Saints’ days, the same bell sent a continual crashing through the gorge with a hurting, tangible vibration, like a train in a subway.

Bookstalls had been decadent for decades. When grandfathers were little boys it had been a goodly place of residence, but small factories had long been smoking it out. Indeed, it sat in venerable decrepitude by the fires of its shops. Certain _habitués_ lived on, nor noted the progress of decay, more than an old rat perceives the rotting mould sink deeper into his confining walls, or the crumble of his domestic plasters.

Routledge in London was one of the _habitués_. The place was associated to him with dim beginnings--a store-room of sentiments and war-relics kept by the year. Before this fire he had written his first views of London for an American newspaper, and here he had brought various reminders of travel. To Bookstalls he returned from his first journey to India--returned with the old brown Mother’s mystic whisperings in his brain, her mystic winds filling the sails of his soul. Gazing at this same grate-fire, tranced as by the heart of crystal, he had sunk into his first meditations, murmuring the star-reaching OM--until the boy within him, crude with Europe, broke the spell in fright, lest his divided bodies join together no more. Those days he had drunk deep of the Vedas; and the Bhagavad Gita was one with him according to his light. Out of these he came to see and feel the great Wheel of Births and Deaths and Re-Births moving true and eternal in the cogs of Karma. And, having once sensed and discovered this, the little problems of the earth’s day and generation are but gentle calisthenics for the mind.

Routledge looked back upon those pure days wistfully now. It is given a man but once in this life to follow the Way. When manhood is fresh and sensitive, retaining all its delicate bloom and unhurt power; and when, full of a hunger that never falls below the diaphragm, the young man turns for Truth to the masters and sages--this is the time to choose between the world and the stars! This is the time that the world gives battle to detain the searching soul. “Look, yonder is a Joseph climbing to God!” cries the old Flesh-mother; and, gathering her minions of enchantment and her dragons of fear, she scorns the lower cities, all safely swarming to her tribute, to pluck at the skirts of the Heaven-called.... What red flowers of passion she strews before him on the rocky, upland way; what songs of conquest she summons from the lower groves; with what romances does she stir his rest, all fragrant-lipped and splendor-eyed; what a Zion she rears of cloud and clay to hold his eyes from the Heights--are not all these written, aye, burned, into the history of Man?

Who goes beyond? A valiant few.... If the enchantments fail to hold him, and if his clear eyes penetrate the illusions of sense; lo, the path grows steep and dark before him, and there are dragons in the way! The faith of the youth must be as Daniel’s now, which is tetanus for lions and palsy for every monster. He has not lingered with the lusts. Will he not falter before the fears?

The many tarry in the tinsel gardens of sense; the few turn back before the roar of the Furies; the One--but who can tell how the bay-tree blooms for him, where glory waits?...

The saddest part of all is, that those who are called and turn back, learn in the coolness of years how treacherous are the enchantments, and that never a dragon of the dark harmed a hair of Strongheart; but the way shines not so clear for a second journey, and the soul is hardened with skepticisms past responding to the Inner Voice. The man must be born again.

Routledge sat in his old leathern chair and looked back a little sorrowfully upon the boy of twelve years ago, all clean from the dust of the world’s trails, uncalloused by war, sensitive to the spirit, stirring in the chrysalis of flesh, all lit with star-stuff!... If only he had known Noreen Cardinegh then!... He could look deeply within. He did not love the manner of man he saw in himself--a wanderer striding over the East; sitting down often for a year, in the places white men choose most ardently to avoid, and devoting himself (who dared look back wistfully now upon those beginnings of spiritual life) to the reddest ructions of Matter--war, red war.

He shook his head bitterly, rose, and went to the window, looking down upon thronging Bookstalls with unseeing eyes. Out of it all came this at last:

“No, Routledge-san, you have given your reddest blood and whitest fire to old Mother Asia. Would it be fair and clean of you to yoke the remnant--and such an earthy remnant--with the lofty purity of Noreen Cardinegh?”

Long he stood there in the depths of thinking, until startled by the softly uttered name:

“Routledge-san.”

He was sure his own lips had not formed the syllables. He wondered if it had winged across the city from Cheer Street.... His glance fell to the road. Below, and a little to the right he perceived the White Mustache. Routledge seized his hat and descended quickly, but the stranger was gone. For a half-hour he tried to trap the other into a meeting, but in vain. It was after mid-day and raining. He had intended to go to the _Review_ office, but the old leathern chair and the friendly lodging lured him back. To-morrow would do for the _Review_. To-night, the Army and Navy reception. Everybody he knew would be there.... She had asked him to come to Cheer Street, but he could not bring himself to break in upon old Jerry’s home-coming. He stirred the fire and fell to musing again in the glow.

FIFTH CHAPTER

ROUTLEDGE STEPS OUT SPIRITEDLY IN THE FOG TO FIND HIS FRIENDS AND ENCOUNTERS THE HATE OF LONDON

Routledge left his lodgings a little before nine that night, and breasted the February fog in his great frieze coat. He was minded to hail a cab when he wearied of walking, but the time and distance were put behind with a glow and a gradually quickening pace. It was a good four miles from Bookstalls to Trafalgar Square and the Armory where the Army and Navy reception was held. He skirted Hyde Park, now in the zenith of its season, and glimpsed Piccadilly again. Its full electric bloom was a ghastly sheen in the fog. London, the old and blackened brick Mammoth, was sweet to him, even now vaporing in her night-sweat.... He had thought of these shops, clubs, lights, smells, and monuments in the long, heaven-clear Indian nights. Afar in the Himalayas, where the old Earth-mother strains hungrily toward the stars (as does the soul of man who broods in those austere heights), he had thought hard upon these stirring pavements and yearned for them in red moments of memory. In the rice-lands of Rangoon; in the cotton country Bombayward; in the bazaars of Lahore; overlooking the plains from Simla; in the under-world of Calcutta, and the house-tops of Benares--he had mapped these streets in reflection and colored certain land-marks with desire.

Here, in his own world-yard again, walking for an hour through the centre of London, and not a human had hailed him. The strokes of ten boomed down from some spire lost in the muffling mists.

“One would have to carry a lantern, like the old prophet of the barrel-house, to find his playmates in a night like this. Besides,” he added, “most of my playmates by this time are bathing in the vanities across the Square.”

There was a herd of carriages at the entrance to the famous ball-room; and under the awnings he encountered the quick, natty figure of the much-liked Finacune--seized the shoulders of the little man affectionately.

“Hello, old heart--my first glimpse of a white man in the Home-zone----”

Finacune turned in an abrupt, unnerved way. “Why, how d’ do, Routledge?” he mumbled throatily. His right hand had jerked toward the other from habit, but was withdrawn without the clasp. “How d’ do? Comin’ in, I s’pose?”

With this astonishing greeting, the _Word_ man leaped up the stone steps and left his “mystic of the wars” beneath the dripping canopy, not a little perturbed. The rather intent regard of the cab-starter pulled Routledge from his reflecting after a moment, and he followed Finacune into the Hall, being shown at once to the gentlemen’s coat-room. Apparently Finacune had shed his outer garment with incredible speed, for he was not there; nor any other guests. Routledge’s first thought was that a joke was being perpetrated at his expense, Finacune’s action merely preparing the way, but he could not hold fast to this. His whole nature was sensitive at once to a formidable disorder.

His name trembled above the sense-stirring music as he stepped upon the floor of the brilliant hall. It was a distinguished company of admirals, generals, civilian campaigners, and exalted representatives of the Home, Foreign, and Colonial Departments; the bravest men of the kingdom, perhaps; certainly some of the fairest women. The throng moved about in a slow, suppressed way; and the faces turned toward him not gladly, not pointedly, but in a quick, secretive, on-the-defensive fashion, as upon some huge agent of menace and craft.

With difficulty, Routledge controlled the muscles of his face. The public speaker knows the moment. Here is straightforward testimony of the power of mind over matter. That first volume of abhorrence and distrust which his eyes had ever met, seemed to rub out his features and weave its own image upon the flesh. He never forgot the sensation. Women craned their heads behind the shoulders of the men. A steward passed before him, fell into the current of hatred, and his face altered visibly. Routledge summoned all his resistance and smiled. He understood instantly that only a few of the men, the most valued tools of the kingdom, knew the specific allegation, and that by the others he was charged with some dreadful generality. Finacune had disappeared. Jerry Cardinegh had not arrived. Trollope, that goodly bullock of a man, most slow of all to be blown in a gale of popular opinion, stood nearest to Routledge. The two faced each other fixedly.

“I say, brother, what’s up?” Routledge inquired lightly.

“I was thinking of interviewing you on the matter--not for publication, of course, but for my own curiosity,” was the puzzling answer.

Routledge quickly stepped forward, but Trollope turned away.

Burling-Forster, an artillery chieftain, whose valor, years before at Quetta, had vividly been placed before the British people by Routledge, the only civilian detached with him at the time, took the place of Trollope now and stared with steady, stony insolence, an accomplishment of Englishmen only, at the man who had made him famous. He did not move to take the hand which Routledge was careless enough to offer him. However, Burling-Forster uttered a sentence which showed that he quite forgot that there were women in the room.

There was not a shade of change now in the brown hue of Routledge’s face, nor in the pleasure of his smile.

“Colonel, I once saw your temper working to better effect,” he said courteously.... “Feeney,” he remarked, turning to the grim visage of the old man, “perhaps you may tell me--am I out of order to inquire what this game is?”

“It appears to me,” Feeney answered gloomily, “that you are out of order anywhere.”

“Thank you--I didn’t know.”

It was now the turn of Dartmore, the editor of the _Review_. As has been related, it had been the recent vocation of Routledge to make this newspaper important in and between wars. To be insulted by Dartmore was like being thrown from a horse into a hedge of Spanish-bayonets.

“I am glad that you were crafty enough not to call at the _Review_ office to-day, though you’ve got hell’s own audacity to come here. Don’t go to the _Review_ for your cheque. I will see to it that it is brought to the Rubicon Buffet within an hour. I advise you to buy something with it to kill yourself.”

A tall figure in evening wear brushed by Routledge now, rather roughly and without apology. It was Bingley, of the _Thames_. For an instant Routledge was blinded--the Hindus name it well--by the red mists of passion. He had drilled himself to bear the words, had listened coldly, curiously, for the past few moments, but the actual physical contact unleashed his rage.

“I shouldn’t advise him to kill himself until he is well clear of the shores of England, Dartmore--the taint, you know!” Bingley said with a brassy smile.

The face of a woman hurrying toward him through the breathless groups in the great reception hall pulled Routledge out of delirium.

“Bingley,” he remarked, shutting his eyelids forcibly, as if to expel the rheum of anger, “I’ll bear in mind your suggestion.”

The editor turned his back upon his prince of servants, as routine men frequently dare to do. A butler stood by Routledge with the great frieze coat. The air became electric with whisperings. The whole company was intent upon a matter, the nature of which only a handful knew. But the others discussed it in awed, hungry eagerness--in that deplorable, hungerish way of lesser folk who are enabled to forget their own limitations by the spectacle of one of the mighty fallen. Routledge swung into his outer garment, smiling strangely....

Then the ladies of the kingdom gasped and the valiants stared. A lady broke in through the narrowing circle and ran to the outcast--a wondrous Irish lady of red-gold hair and pale gold silk. Her hand fell upon the sleeve of his great-coat, and her face, the masterpiece from the famous gallery of Erin, was upturned proudly but pitifully to his.

“They won’t tell me--they speak of treachery, but no one dares to tell me--what is this horrid mistake?” she demanded.

The sudden look of tenderness in Routledge’s eyes gave way to fear and pain. The others had stepped back.

“Run away, you blessed girl,” he whispered. “Something big is wrong. I seem to understand it least of all--but its plain I’m bad medicine here now. It will all come out. Meanwhile, don’t be seen with me, Noreen!” He added in the shadow of a whisper, “Your father----”

“Father will be here to-night. He brought me to the door, promising to be back within an hour. I think he went to find you. Oh, he’s changed--more than I feared! But you, Routledge-san----”

“Please leave me. You are assailing your position by talking with me. That hurts worse than anything these people might say. I shall go out and think it over.... Good-night, Noreen, my dear friend.”

But she clung to his arm. “What do I care what _they_ think of me? I want _you_ to know--you must know when you are alone--that there is one woman who will stand by you, through all things!”

Her words were not lost to the periphery of the crowd. He drew back stoutly, but his heart sank when she added even more loudly: “Remember, you have one friend--even though all your brave companions fail!”

His lips moved with the words: “Dear Noreen--say no more.”

“_Remember me!_” came back to him.

For an instant she watched as he turned to the door--lineage to Plantagenet and stuff of angels warm in her heart. The other women fathomed his attempt to shield her from them and from her own impulsiveness. What they thought of his gallantry they did not tell; but what they thought of Noreen Cardinegh was revealed in jewelled combs and in the elaborate artistry of back-hair which met her eyes when she turned once more to the hall.

“Mighty brave of you, I’m sure, Miss Cardinegh,” said Bingley, stepping to her side. “I should like to have a friend so loyal. But you’re wrong this time, really----”

“Even so, Mr. Bingley, I shall trust to my own judgment,” she answered, moving swiftly into the throng, where he did not essay to follow.

Routledge had not missed the attitude of the Hall toward her. The tempest of abhorrence, though a new and very wonderful brand of battle, did not shatter his philosophy, but the slight which his champion was enduring for his sake--this was grim hell in his heart.

Outside he fought it, the roar of dripping London in his ears. A cab drove up to the reception-canopy, and her father, Jerry Cardinegh, stepped out--incredibly shrunken, altered, and uncertain of step. Far different had he left London for India less than a year before, a hard, weathered, full-blooded man. Routledge hungered now for his friend of friends, but he did not call.

In the Rubicon Buffet, across the Square, the _Review’s_ cheque was handed him presently by a messenger. The outcast signed the receipt, and sat down dazedly, forgetting to drink. An hour later, Burling-Forster entered the buffet with some friends from the Armory. The artilleryman saw Routledge at a far table and backed out.

“We will go on,” said he. “I perceive that this is no place for us.”

The manager’s quick eye had seen Burling-Forster’s glance rest upon the solitary figure at the distant table, and he stared doubtfully now at Routledge. The latter rose and approached him. “Forgive me,” he said, quitting the place. “Not for fortunes would I impair the popularity of your excellent buffet.”

London had changed in an hour; it was pitiless, alien. Yet he could laugh at London. The thought that made him writhe had to do with the gorgeous woman who had cast herself into the débris of his fortunes--the woman who had meant so much to him in the silences of service.... He moved about in the fog; passed the _Review_ office, glanced up at the fourth floor, the blazing lights just a pale glimmer now. Friends were there, putting their best of brain and hand into the maw of the morning paper. The cutting sentences of Dartmore returned, and he did not go upstairs. In the little press-club around the corner, the day men were in festival. Routledge winced--and passed by. There was time still to catch a night-train for Paris, but he couldn’t let the mystery beat him, not even for the glisten of Paris--not for New Jerusalem! He would wait and ask no questions. A broad, low building very lavish with its music, lights, and laughter appeared at length upon the right of way. Routledge inquired of a policeman what was going on within.

“It’s the cab-drivers’ annual ’op, sir,” the officer said.

“May one enter who is not a cab-driver at present?” Routledge asked.

“’Avin’ the price, sir.”