Part 8

But this life would never know freedom from that thrilling, beautiful memory. He could sacrifice a union with Noreen Cardinegh, but never renounce her from the high place of his heart. She was wedded to the source and centre of his life, and no asceticism could shrive her from him. He might put half the planet’s curve between, but the bride the world had formed for him would be the eternal crying voice in the wilderness; and until they were mated in this or another life, the Wheel of Births and Deaths would never whirl him free from love, the loftiest of all illusions. Though he sat in a temple upon the roof of the world, holding his thoughts among the stars until the _kusa grass_ beneath him was blown like dust away, and his body petrified upon the naked rock, the last breath from the ruin would stir his lips to the name of the world’s bright gift to him--Noreen.

Johnny Brodie returned. Routledge took him by the hand and led him into the midst of his possessions.... It was quite a happy time, with the old landlady looking on, and a mysterious fund in her pocket for Johnny stockings, and Brodie trousers and even dinners, when old Bookstalls was remiss in her duty. Finally, at the last moment, Routledge dropped his hand upon the boy’s shoulder. The face was turned up clear, the eyes unblinking. The man was no longer afraid.

“Johnny,” he said, “the best fellows in this world are those who are strong enough to hold their tongues at the right time. Nobody must know about this little room--_nobody_. To you, I’m just a decent stranger who has gone away. If anybody asks who or where or how or why about me--you don’t know. This is all yours. Sleep tight, and say nothing. If you need anything that you can’t get yourself, go to the landlady. Be clean about what you do everywhere--I don’t mean in the room, Johnny, but everywhere, in the street, too. Not clean about your hands and face--that’s good--but mostly about what you think. I may come back some time, and I may not, but you’ll be fixed here as long as you need. Think of it, Johnny Brodie--remember this well: always if something hits you from inside that a thing isn’t good to do, don’t hurry about doing it. Think it over. If you wouldn’t do it when the person you like best in the world is watching, it isn’t a good thing to do alone.”

Routledge locked his lodgings. With the boy attached to one hand and his bag in the other, he went down into the street, and just at that moment a carriage opened at the curb, and Noreen Cardinegh stepped out. Routledge took the outstretched hand, but there was a warm flood of pain widening within him, as blood from an opened wound....

The rain-coat hung about her like a delicate harmony, its hood covering her hair; and its high-rolling collar, bound with scarlet, thin as a thread but vivid as an oriflamme, concealed her throat. That lustrous, perfect oval face in the rain. It was luminous from within like a pearl, and had _its_ scarlet-edging in the curving, exquisite lips, strange with inner vividness. Never had she been so wondrous to him as he felt the superb zest of life beneath the pearl-gray glove that moment in grimy Bookstalls. A conception of womanhood that widened the limitations of any man!... He lifted his glance from the pavement, where it had been held for an instant by the glittering point of her boot, and found the great eyes upon him--pools of splendor which held his temple, white as truth, golden sunlight on its dome; and, far within, a dim, mystic sanctuary where Mother Earth had built a shrine for him.

“Thank God you have not gone, Routledge-san!” she said in a low way. “Tell me--ah, but I know--you would have gone without a word to me.... You think it is right?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you punish me this way, Routledge-san?... Do you think I mind what London cares or thinks? Do you think London could force me to believe ill of you?... I must talk with you! May we not go up into your rooms, out of the crowd and the rain? The little boy may come.”

There was not a window commanding the street which might not have held the White Mustache that moment; not a single passer-by who might not have been one of his kind.

“I have turned in my--that is, I have given up my room,” he faltered.

“I must talk with you. Come into my carriage. That will be the better way. The little boy----”

She caught the look of hostility in the street-waif’s eyes. She was taking the man away. There was another look, the meaning of which she did not miss. Routledge bent down to him.

“Good-by, little soul,” he said. “I’ll find you in some doorway again some time--maybe in the doorway to fame. Be a good little fellow always. Don’t get tired of being clean, and some time you’ll be mighty glad.”

The boy watched the carriage move slowly away among the truckage--until a stranger put a hand upon his shoulder.

* * * * *

For many seconds neither spoke; then it was Noreen.

“What is this big thing you are doing, Routledge-san?”

“I cannot tell--even you.”

“Yes, but you need not have hurt me so. You were going away without a word to me--and I am so proud to have been for you--against the others.”

“Noreen, you must believe that it is not good for you to be seen with me now. Every movement I make is known; everyone in the slightest communication with me is under suspicion. Your loyalty--I cannot even speak of steadily, it is so big and dear--and because it is so, I shudder to drag you into these forlorn fortunes of mine. It is in the power of these people to make you very miserable while I am gone--and that is anguish to me, nothing less.”

“You think of me--think of me always, and a little social matter which concerns me!” she exclaimed. “I care nothing for it--oh, please believe that. Last night you left the Armory, not knowing what had befallen you. This morning you know all. Could you have done unconsciously--anything to turn the Hate of London upon you?... It is not in reason. I believe it is just and right for me to know what my father told you in the night--but you will not tell me----”

“This thing is mine to carry--to carry alone. Last night I laughed. To-day I find that it is not a thing to laugh at. The Hate of London,”--Routledge carved out the words slowly and clearly, in spite of the resistance of his whole humanity--“I have brought upon myself.”

“Not with dishonor!”

He was silent.

“Not with dishonor, Routledge-san!” she whispered triumphantly, peering into his eyes. “You could not convey a falsehood to me, not even to shield another--not even if you uttered the words of the lie. Your eyes would tell the truth to me!”

Rain splashed upon the windows of the carriage. The face so near him in the gloom was like the vision of a master-artist, too perfect for the poor human hand. The pressure of her shoulder; the fragrance of her presence; the voice of her which stirred within him the primal mystery of other lives--against such he fought for strength.... It was not passion in the red meaning of the word, but a love that made the railway gates at Charing Cross his portals to living death.

“Think what you will,” he commanded, after a moment. “God knows, I do not want you to think me devilish, but you must be silent to others about me.... You will make me suffer more than you know--if you stand against London for me--when I am gone. It was a magnificent life labor of your father’s which purchased for you--your place in London.... Noreen Cardinegh, I shall leave the carriage as we approach Charing Cross; and in the name of God, do nothing to further attract my infamy to your name!”

“We will say no more about that,” she answered quietly. “I shall avoid every man and woman in London who would dare to speak of infamy and Routledge-san in one breath, but if they seek me out!... But I have other things to say. You must go, and I must stay. Before you go, I shall tell you what you have done for Noreen Cardinegh, and what you mean to her--to me.... You are my bravest man, Routledge-san.... When I was but a little girl my father told me of you. I have heard all the men speak of you. Yours would have been the greatest of all welcomes at the Armory last night--save for this terrible mystery. I saw the way that little boy looked up at you this morning. I know what he thought--for the same thoughts were mine in Japan when I was but a little older. And your work has been deep and important to me--a personal, illuminating service. It has made me see the vanity of piled stones, the futility of possessions. In looking the way you pointed--I have found that real life is not food and metal----”

The tension was eased for a moment. Routledge laughed softly. “Why, I am but a dealer in war-stuff--the most godless of all matter, Noreen,” he said.

“A dealer in war-stuff--to make the world see the horrible farce of it! Oh, don’t think I have failed to see the import of your work, or failed to contrast it with the ponderous egotism of certain other English war-correspondents, who build their careers upon wars--with their dull studies of tactics, their heavy handling of strategies--so comically like a child panting with heavy stones. Do you think that I did not see, in spite of your brilliant description how the Japanese caught and held the van at Tientsin, the real picture of your whole story--that of a cruel, ruthless nation of insensate boys--running to jaw instead of mind?”

Routledge was startled by the expression of a thought which the _Review_ would not intentionally have published, less obviously than in a charade. There was nothing of vanity in the matter, but her words became dear to memory--rifts in that dreadful parting hour. Certainly there was deep gladness for the woman in the telling:

“They speak of you losing yourself in India for months and months. Do you think I have missed all that you have found, Routledge-san, when you were lost to men? I know something of what India means to you, her submission and her famines, and the hundreds of little Warren Hastings’ trooping over her, from Lahore to Pondicherry, brooding of pounds and power! Why, to me you have placed it clear as Carlyle with his reverberating thunders of fifty years ago. Here is England, sitting dull-eyed among her flesh-pots, and yonder is India--drained. You did not say it in direct words, Routledge-san, but you made me see the provinces of India scattered about like the shells of insects in a spider’s web, and this London--the darkened lair of the watching eyes.... Oh, I have seen all that you mean, Routledge-san, but more--the bigger, finer things than national relations.... You have gone into the silent places to meditate, and to me you have brought back the images of the silence--big, chaste things, like our bravest man. There is good and there is hope in the world which holds such men and such things--and because of you I have kept my optimism. I seem to have a perfect torrent of talk, but I have been so much alone to think--and you are going away. I want you to know that you and the things you have brought to me are bigger--than London and the world.... When I speak with you--I seem to have known you always.... And then you are going away--with a burden in your heart, which no act of yours put there.... Why is it, Routledge-san, that one’s bravest man must suffer such deluges of evil?”

“Noreen, you are resistless,” he murmured. “It is life----”

She pressed her face to the pane, tried thoughtlessly to brush away the blurring rain on the outside. With a quick, savage return of pain, she realized how near they were to Charing Cross.

“I haven’t told you--all that I mean yet, Routledge-san!” she whispered feverishly. “You met some adversary last night and conquered. You are weak and hurt--but you have won.... I cannot quite understand, but the sentence ringing in my brain is this: ‘The young grain is springing on the field of Waterloo.’... I met my adversary in the night--and I have won, too. When I think of you--it rushes over me like a tidal wave--to fight London and the world for you; but I have my work here. It must be done cleanly and without a cry. My father needs me. The best is gone from him already--and I must treasure the rest; but it will not be always.... And when my work is finished in Cheer Street, Routledge-san, I shall cross the world to find you!”

He felt it hard to breathe in the desolation. A desire full-formed and upstanding, in spite of the mockery of it, vanquished him for a moment. It was to keep on with her--riding, journeying, sailing--with her, through the gates of Charing Cross, to Southampton, New York, San Francisco, Yokohama, Nagasaki, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Calcutta--up the Ganges to its source in the Hills, and there among the mystic people of his heart, to dwell with her, adoring in the stillness of starlight, in the morning glow.

“I shall be nameless, and a wanderer----”

“And my bravest man!... This is not unwomanly, Routledge-san. This is farewell. The girl is torn from me--and the woman speaks her heart.... No one but you could understand. Always I have been strange.... I cannot leave it unsaid. I shall come to find you when I am free! It is not--not that I shall ask you to marry me. It is not that--but to be with you! I think--I think that you are so noble that my being a woman would not complicate.... Routledge-san! It is Charing Cross!”

Swiftly she drew tiny scissors from a pocket-case, snipped from her temple a lock of hair, tied it with a strand of its own, and thrust it into his hand.

It was light, living, warm like a bird in his palm. Her last words intoned through his dreams for many days:

“Remember, I am Noreen Cardinegh--who believes in you always--before all men--for all time. And I, too, must be brave and enduring until my work is done--and I may cross the world to find you!”

... He was standing at the curb before the great station. The carriage had turned away. There came to him out of the throng--a cry, not to his ears, but straight to his breast, a cry wild with desolation, which his heart answered....

He purchased his ticket, and rechecked his baggage, and then passed through the gates to the gray, smoky yards. From the deck of his steamer at Southampton that night he caught a last glimpse of the White Mustache, a satisfied smile on the keen, hard face. In a cold, distant fashion, Routledge marvelled that he was allowed to leave England alive.

NINTH CHAPTER

MR. JASPER IS INFORMED THAT MOTHER INDIA CAUSED NAPOLEON’S DEFEAT, AND THAT FAMINES ARE NOT WITHOUT VIRTUE

“J. J. Jasper, Syracuse, New York,” was being inscribed in the hotel registers along the travelled-lines around the world. Mr. Jasper was making no haste. “I have been rushed all my life until now,” he explained. He was a sincere, hard-thinking, little man of fifty, who had manufactured road-carts for thirty years, and had succeeded remarkably well in emancipating himself from business--a high-ranged achievement for only the few Americans.

Mr. Jasper was interested in India long before he touched Bombay, going east. This happened because his sister was a member of a theosophical class back in Syracuse. He had heard of “dreamy India” for many years, of Madras and the Ganges, of _yogis_ and astral bodies, of esoteric sections and H.P.B., of Sinnett, Olcott, Besant, masters, famines, of _karma_, _devachan_, _pralaya_, of metempsychosis and the Great White Lodge of the Himalayas.... “Go to Madras, James,” his sister had told him. “By all means, go to Madras. Our headquarters and our libraries of occult literature are there. It may be that our president and founder, Mr. Olcott, will meet you personally, or Annie Besant, the most noted woman in the world. Don’t call it ‘Bes_ant_’, like the author, but as if it were spelled ‘_Bes_sant.’ There are reasons, James, _esoteric reasons_.”

And so Mr. Jasper went to Madras. He took the hand of white-bearded Olcott,[A] a rounded man, who had not lost interest in the New York bar or press simply because he was president and founder of a great body of generally refined men and women who have the temerity to believe that buying cheap and selling dear is not the supreme glory of man. Also Mr. Jasper pronounced it “_Bes_sant,” for esoteric reasons, but he did not meet the most noted woman in the world, since she had taken her annual flight to London.

In the midst of all his seeing and smelling and brooding among the coast cities of India, Mr. Jasper was impressed with the dire poverty of certain districts. The heart of the man was wrung, and his brain filled with the Everlasting Why. At the house of a missionary in Nizagari, he ascertained certain facts. The Hindus of the town were hungry. They came to the missionary, men and wives and babes, and begged most pitifully for food.

“If we could only eat food once in two days, we would ask no more!” they cried.

“God, this is famine--the famine of the Bible!” exclaimed the American.

“Ah, no,” replied the missionary. “You must allow me to correct you. There is no _recognized_ famine in Nizagari.”

“If this is not famine--what does the word mean?”

“Go to the central provinces,” the missionary said wearily. “Famine is declared there.”

Mr. Jasper thought long that night. He recalled being left once, when he was a much younger man, in New York city over night without money. The metropolis was a city of strangers to him then, but, as now, a city of pure and plenteous water, free lunches, and benches to sit upon. Moreover, it was a summer night; and yet before mail-time in the morning, Mr. Jasper felt that his cosmos had dropped into chaos.... “I will arise and go to the Central Provinces,” he declared. After many weary days, he alighted from his train in the hot, fetid city of Nagpur.

“Famine,” they told him--he thought he saw famine in the eyes of the English--“yes, there is famine northward, but the government has taken it in hand. You see, when a famine is officially declared it doesn’t last long....”

Mr. Jasper hurried northward, lest it be over before he reached there. He wanted to see the conditions which would cause the Anglo-Indians officially to recognize famine. Finally, it was borne upon him that he must leave the railway to discover the reality, and he made his way eastward, for a long day’s journey, by bullock-cart and sedan-chair, across a burning, forsaken land to the town of Rydamphur--too little and too far for the English yet to have heard its cry. Least of villages, Rydamphur, a still, sterile, Christless place, sprawled upon a saffron desert. He paid his coolies at the edge of the village, and they pointed out the Rest House among the huts.

The place was dead as a dream creation. There was something febrile, unnatural in the late afternoon sunlight. The houses looked withered and ready to fall in that dead-gold light. He passed a darkened doorway and was stabbed by the spur of horrid understanding--a blast of unutterable fetor.... He ran for a step or two, horrified as if he had trodden upon the dead in the dark. His brain was filled with muttering: “This is famine! This is famine!”... Mr. Jasper turned shortly, and saw emerging from the darkened hut--a white man in native dress. It was a face incapable of tan, and fixed with a sorrow too deep for tears--a wild, tragic sorrow, vivid in the fever-wide eyes....

It was all nightmarish and inchoate. Thus he entered the oven of bricks called the Rest House, and bathed, changed, and gasped, while the snoring punkahs whipped him with hot, sterilizing breaths.... Dinner that evening at eight. Mr. Jasper sat down to a table with a gaunt, embrowned stranger in white linen--a wasted giant, with a head and figure of singular command; eyes that were weary and restless, but very wise and very kind. So sun-darkened was the face that Mr. Jasper thought at first his companion must be a native of high caste; especially since he ate no meat and sparingly of the rest. The dinner was meagre, but a feast compared to what was expected in the nucleus of a famine district.

“I didn’t suppose such a variety of food could be procured here,” Mr. Jasper observed.

“There has been plenty of food to be had for money, until the last day or two,” the stranger replied.

“And the natives have no money?”

Mr. Jasper realized that the question was inane, but his eagerness was great to draw the man before him into conversation. There was a distinguished look in the man’s face which promised much. He proved by no means disinclined to talk; indeed, seemed urged by a strange zeal for conversation that night, as one who has been in prison, or somewhere long and far from his kind.

“I came here, not out of vulgar curiosity, but striving to understand,” Mr. Jasper said.

“And how do you like our great brown Mother India?”

“She does not feed her children.”

“That is true. Mother India must come back to the table of the world and learn how things are served by the younger peoples--the sharper-eyed, quicker-handed peoples. You have heard the story, no doubt, that India had once great and profitable industries. Her commercial systems were founded upon mutual service, not upon competition. Then the East India company and England came. ‘Mother India, you are quite absurd,’ said England, and she took away all the mutual benefit industries, and reorganized them again in the true English way. ‘We shall show you how, Mother India,’ she said. India must have been inept, because England never gave them back.”

Both men were smiling. “Then you think India famines are the result of British rule?” the man from Syracuse observed.

“If I told you that, it would be right for me to explain why I think so. That would take some time, and the night is very hot.”

“I came to Rydamphur to learn the truth. Somehow, I believe I shall succeed--if you will tell me what you can, sir.” The stranger’s eyes brightened.

“Discussing the matter seriously, it is well to begin with Macaulay’s sentence. ‘The heaviest of all yokes is the yoke of a stranger.’”

“You are not an Englishman?” Mr. Jasper asked.

“No, but does that signify? Many English have spoken the truth. Edmund Burke said, ‘The Tartar invasion was mischievous, but it is our protection which destroys India.’ The English historian, Montgomery Martin, wrote that so constant a drain as England’s upon India would impoverish England herself if she were subjected to it. And here reflect that the wage of the laborer, when he gets work, averages but twopence a day. J. I. Sunderland observes, ‘The British have _given_ India railways, jute-mills, tea plantations, and many things else.... The profits go to the British.’ Mr. Sunderland, no doubt, remarks elsewhere about the opium industry. Herbert Spencer declares that it was an arrogant assumption upon the part of the British to accept as a fact that India exists for England. He also characterizes England’s relations to India as a ‘cunning despotism which uses native soldiers to maintain and extend native subjection.’”

“But we in America,” said Mr. Jasper--“I refer to those who have not looked deeply into the question--even our president, Mr. Roosevelt--have regarded English rule in India as a vast and beneficent system.”

“Ah, yes,” responded the stranger, with a queer smile; “as you say, those who have not looked deeply into the question, regard it so. There was another American president, Mr. Lincoln, who declared that no man is good enough to govern another man.... But there are errors of judgment all around the world, and errors of ignorance which make for cruelty. English agents will come here to poor little Rydamphur presently with rice and millet, and when the rains start, the periodic famine officially will be declared over for another year, and the people of this district will arise to the normal condition of forty millions of India--that of slow starvation.”

“But why don’t the Hindus emigrate?”