Part 9

“Mother India cannot afford to give her children passage money,” the stranger declared quickly. “She is sending a few, the pith and promise of her young men, to America and elsewhere to learn from the younger peoples how to take care of herself in commercial matters, in the hope of reviving her industries in centuries to come. But the ordinary low-castes, _the fuel of the famines_, would have to starve a little extra in good times to save from their earnings the price to cross one of our North River ferries. They would die long before they hoarded the fare from Brooklyn Bridge to Coney Island.”

Mr. Jasper’s eyes kindled at the references. “But why do the Hindus not fight?” he asked.

“India has no arms.”

“But even our little South and Central American States get arms and fight right merrily with them.”

“India is poorer than the little South and Central American States--so poor that it requires a white man years to conceive the meaning of her poverty.” The speaker leaned forward and added in a slow, bitter way: “Forty millions in India are hungry to-night: forty millions are never otherwise than hungry--they pass from the womb to the burning-ghats, never having known a moment of repletion: yet England drains India of one hundred million dollars a year. Listen; in the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century ten millions in India died of famine. In the same period England vampirized this land of the hungry of twenty-five hundred millions of dollars. This is one of the tragic facts of the world.

“Here’s another: in the nineteenth century England compelled India to maintain five times as many troops as were needed for her own defense or her own _subjection_--in other words, forced India to furnish troops for British conquests outside of India!... Would you mind, sir, if I uttered a sentence that has never been uttered before?”

Mr. Jasper laughed a little nervously.

“It was India that whipped Napoleon.”

“There’s some shock to that statement. Tell me how.”

“In the fifty-seven years between the battles of Plassey and Waterloo, England looted a billion in pounds sterling--five thousand million dollars--from the conquered Indian people. This was the price India paid for bondage, for ruined industries and periodic famines. This was the period of England’s military expansion. The army that crushed Napoleon was fed and clothed and armed by Indian tributes.”

Neither spoke for a moment, and the stranger added with an impressiveness that Mr. Jasper never forgot: “It is rather stirring to remember that this old India was highly civilized, in a rich meaning of the expression, ripe in arts, letters, and incomparable philosophies, when the ancestors of the English were painted savages. India was the leader of Asiatic civilization, and perhaps the richest country in the world, when England broke in upon her. What is old India now? Hearken to the souls passing in little Rydamphur to-night!”

“But what, in God’s name, can be done?” Mr. Jasper demanded.

“When England begins to treat India as she would be forced to treat a colony of white men, aggressive as Americans, for instance, India will begin to discover her gray of morning.”

“But England won’t do that until India becomes a militant people.”

“No, I’m afraid not. England still has much of her imperialistic arrogance.... A little while ago, one of the ablest of the native editors, an old man, was banished from the country for six years because he published an article in his paper pointing out his country’s misfortunes. This aged editor was a Murahti, and during his trial called for a Murahti jury. On the contrary, the jury was made of English and Parsees. The prisoner did not know a word of the court’s proceedings until an interpreter informed him of his banishment. Another young Hindu nobleman was recently banished for life because he took part in public speeches. The English judge who sentenced this young man declared that there was no reason for one Hindu addressing a gathering of Hindus, since the latter had no votes. I call that a rather interesting political homily.”

“It is chief among outrages,” declared Mr. Jasper.

The other regarded him intently a moment, as if deliberating whether it were wise to go a bit farther. He studied the deep and honest interest in the perspiring face, and caught up the question afresh:

“India, the best of India, has lost from her blood that which makes for war and commercial conquests. She is the longest suffering of all the nations. She asks only for peace. Those great playthings of the more material powers--navies, soldiery, colonies, armament--she cannot appreciate, cannot understand. India is not cowardly. You would not call an old man a coward because he rebukes with a smile a young brute who has struck him. Old mystic India prefers to starve rather than to outrage her philosophy with war. She has even adjusted her philosophy to the spectacle of her children starving, rather than to descend to the outgrown ugliness of physical warfare. It has been work of mine to study the nations somewhat, and I have come to think of them as human beings at different ages.... Look at young Japan--the sixteen-year-old among the powers! A brown-skinned, black-eyed boy, cruel, unlit from within, formidable, and itching to use again the strength he has once felt. To the boy-brain, supremacy at war is the highest victory the world can give. Japan has the health of a boy, heals like an earth-worm, and blazes with pride in the possession of his first weapons. Like the boy again, he is blind to the intrinsic rights of women. Shamelessly, he casts his women out over the seven seas to fill the brothels of every port--breeds human cattle to feed the world’s lusts, and knows no prick of pride--but watch him run hot-breathed to the rifle-pits if so much as a bit of humor from an outside nation stirs the restless chip upon his shoulder! Brute boy, Japan, the trophies of conquests are as yet but incidents to him. The soldier is in highest manifestation; the expansionist not yet weaned. He fights for the great glory of the fight--mad with the direct and awful lust of standing in the midst of the fallen....

“America?... Yes, I am an American. America is thirty-five, as I see her, and her passion is for the symbol of conquest, Dollars. America is self-tranced by looking into money, as those who gaze at crystal. The dollar-toxin riots in her veins. All the corrosion of the cursed Hebraic propensity for the concrete, appears to be the heritage of America. She is amassing as men never amassed before. She is lean from garnering, so terrifically beset with multiples and divisors that she has not even learned the material usages of money--how to spend gracefully. One night an American is a profligate prince; the next day a scheming, ravening, fish-blooded money-changer to pay for it. So busy is America collecting the symbols of possession, that she has little time to turn her thoughts to war, though she has by no means yet lost her physical condition. Having whipped England once, and purged herself with an internecine struggle, America now believes that she has only to drop her ticker, her groceries, and her paper continents, snatch up the rifle and cartridge-belt--to whip the world. Just a case of necessity, you know, and Grants and Lees and Lincolns will arise; labor turn into militia, and the land a sounding-board of trampling invincibles. But war is not the real expression of America in this young century. Financial precedence over one’s neighbor, vulgar outward flaunts of opulence, lights, noise, glitter, show--these are the forms of expression in vogue--concrete evidences of a more or less concrete accumulation. The excesses of America are momentary in contrast to the steady glut-glut of big-belted Europe. Of her glory I do not speak, of her humor, her inventions. It is this low present propensity--that is hard to bear. So rich still are America’s national resources that she has found no need of an India yet. May she put on wisdom and sweetness while the evil days come not--God bless her!...

“Look at England--fat and fifty, overfed, short of breath, thickening in girth, deepening in brain. England building her ships to fatten in peace; talking much of war to keep the peace, but far beyond the zest and stir of trumpets. England, entered upon her inevitable period of physical decadence, boasting of conquests, like a middle-aged man with rheum in his eye, the clog of senility under his waist-coat, stiffness in his joints, and the red lights of apoplexy bright upon his throat--who throws out his chest among his sons and pants that he is ‘better than ever, e’gad!’ England, sensuous in the home, crowding her houses like a squirrel’s nest in the frosts; an animated stomach, already cultivating and condimenting her fitful but necessary appetites; wise and crafty in the world, but purblind to her own perversions and lying in the rot of them.... England, who will not put away boyish things and look to God!... She is draining India as Rome drained Gaul, as Spain drained Mexico, and accelerating the bestiality which spells _ruin_--with the spoils.... What a sweet and perfect retaliation if Gaul could only have seen the monstrous offspring of the Cæsars; if the Aztecs had only endured to see what befell Spain after the _Noche Triste_; if India--but did not India point out in her philosophy the wages of national, vampirism--before Cortez and before the Cæsars?

“Then, if I am not wearying you, we might look at Russia, sundering in the pangs of wretched age. Mad, lesioned, its body a parliament of pains, its brain vaporing of past glories in its present ghastliness of disintegration.

“And India, I see a difference here. All men as all nations must suffer. Europe and America are learning to suffer through their excesses; India through her privations, a cleaner, holier way.... I think of India as an old widow who has given away her possessions to a litter of Gonerils and Absaloms--put away all the vanities of conquest and material possessions--a poor old widow with gaunt breasts and palsied hands, who asks only a seat in the chimney-corner, and crumbs from the table of the world!... She has still kept a smile of kindliness for the world, as she sits in the gloom, her soul lifting to the stars....

“After all, famine blinds us, because we are here in the midst of it. It is hard to restrain one’s rebellion in the midst of Rydamphur’s dead, when one thinks that the Englishman spends for intoxicating drinks annually two-and-one-half-times what the Hindu individual spends for food, drink, fuel, clothing, medicine, recreation, education, and religion. It horrifies us little to think that at home they are spending on roaring Broadway, this very night, in dines and wines and steins, and kindred vanities and viciousness, enough to keep a million native mothers in milk for their babes a fortnight. If we could sit away up in the Hills so that all the world were in its proper relation and perspective, we might perceive something sanitive and less sodden in starvation, something less pestilential than the death of drink and gluttony. You know the soul burns bright at the end of much fasting.”

The tall stranger had spoken mildly in the main, as if discussing matters of food before him. Only occasionally he leaned forward, his eyes lit with prophecy or rebellion. Mr. Jasper felt the animation of the other’s presence most remarkably. He had never met such a man, and said so with boyish impulsiveness.

The other regarded him with genuine gratitude. “I was afraid that I had spoken too freely. One is inclined to be fluent in the thing he knows well. I do not mean to say that I know India, but only that I have studied India long. She has many facets, and at best one’s views are but one’s own.”

Mr. Jasper offered his card.

“I thank you,” said the stranger. “I am not carrying cards just now. My name matters little to any one, but I wish you a very good night.”

The Syracuse manufacturer went to his room and sat in the dark under the punkahs, staring out the window and studying what he had heard. The saffron desert was ghostly gray under the brilliant low-hanging stars, and all objects were black and blotchy upon it. It made him think of paintings of Egyptian nights--paintings hung he could not remember where. He was troubled because the stranger withheld his name. Here was a man with whom he would have rejoiced to travel, to know better and better. The thought which recurred strongest out of all that he had heard was: “_All men, as all nations, must suffer._ Europe and America are learning to suffer through their excesses; India through her privations, a cleaner, holier way.”

The drone of the punkah-leathers ruffled his very good nerves at last, and Mr. Jasper went out to walk. In a little hut at the far end of the street, to which he was attracted by candle-light and the voices of white men, he perceived three figures through the open doorway. One was an ancient Hindu, sitting with bowed head upon the matting. The second was a white man in native dress, whom he had seen emerging from the hut of horrors in the afternoon--the face incapable of tan and vivid with tragic sorrow. The third was the sun-darkened young giant who had left him earlier in the evening, who had spoken of India and of her famines, and discussed the Powers as familiarly as one might discuss his partners or rivals in business. Quite inadvertently, Mr. Jasper heard the name which had been withheld from him by its owner--the name of Routledge.... The next day he mentioned this name to the Englishman of the Famine Relief, who had brought provisions to little Rydamphur. He discovered that it was a name to uncover devils.

TENTH CHAPTER

A SINGULAR POWER IS MANIFEST IN THE LITTLE HUT AT RYDAMPHUR, AND ROUTLEDGE PERCEIVES HIS WORK IN ANOTHER WAR

Leaving the Rest House, Routledge walked in the mingled gray and shadow to the hut of the candle-light, where Mr. Jasper afterward saw him. He entered softly. The aged Hindu sat cross-legged upon a mat of rice straw, his eyelids closed as if by effort, his lips and entire chest moving with the Name. This was Sekar, the master who had come down from the goodly mountains for his _chela_--the bravest man. Rawder was lying full-length upon the floor, his head raised over an open book, upon which the light shone. He held up his hand to Routledge, and a glad smile formed on the deep-lined, pallid face.

“Sit down in the cool of the doorway, and let us talk, my good friend. What has the day brought you?”

Routledge obeyed, amused at “the cool of the doorway.” The night breeze was but a withering breath from the hot sand.

“The day has brought sundry brown babes, and I have dutifully squeezed a milky rag into their open mouths. Also, I bought the last rice which the Chunder person who keeps the Rest House will sell at any price, and passed it out to the edges of the hunger. The morning will bring us more dead. What a gruesome monotony it is--dying, dying, dying--and they make so little noise about it. Also, I was so oppressed with famine that I found a good, unobtrusive American and crowded him with facts for an hour--a countryman of ours, Rawder.”

“A countryman of ours,” Rawder repeated softly. “It is long since I have heard the sound of a thought like that. I am not to see my country again, good brother.”

“Then, has Sekar told you what you are to do?”

“Yes. We travel to-night northward. The English will be here to-morrow with grain, so that our work is done in Rydamphur. You will stay here until to-morrow, as you said, and then return westward to the railroad, when the English come.”

“Are you permitted to tell me all that he said?” Routledge asked.

“Yes. To-night at dusk, Sekar stirred from his meditations and we spoke together long. I told him that you meant my whole race to me; that you were dearer to me than any human being I had ever known. I asked if he would permit you to travel with us a little longer. He shook his head. There is much for you still to do in the world. He said that you would begin to find your work as soon as you reached travelled-lines. I told him that your life was in danger where the English were many; that your life had been attempted in Madras, and that it was a heavy sorrow for me to part with you so soon. I asked him if your work in the world were absolute--if it would not be good for your soul to travel slowly to the Hills, doing what we found to do on the way. Sekar shook his head.... Ah, Routledge, my brother, there is to be another war for you. There will come a day in which you will know a great need for human aid, and it will not be given me to come to you--but another--a woman!”

Rawder’s voice trembled. Routledge never forgot the moment. The restless, writhing flame of the candle, straining as if for more vital air; little Rydamphur, out of the ken of the world, and death moving from hut to hut; the still, dreadful Indian night; the ancient mystic, tranced in meditation, so emaciated with years and asceticism that each added breath seemed a dispensation; the white face of Rawder, which had long since been graven with beautiful meanings for his friend; the eyes of Rawder, which had never been defiled by hate or rage or lust, so radiant with sorrow now; and the revelations on Rawder’s lips, which half the human family is still so young as to have called madness.

“He is right,” said Routledge. “It is the law. You have naught to do with human attachments on the way to the Hills. And I am to follow the fortunes of another war?”

“Such a war as never has been----”

“In Asia?”

“Yes. In the north--beyond the mountains. He did not say more, but you are soon to know. God pity you, Routledge! How gladly would I take the travail from you! You are to fall--not among the piled dead, not in the thundering centres of battle, but apart.... You are to live. He promised me that you would not die, and that another, a woman, would come to help you. I know you are to live, because it is written that once more in this life I am to take your hand.”

“Just once more?”

“Yes.”

“Did he tell you where?”

Rawder bowed his head. His fingers trembled upon his knee.

“In the Leper Valley,” he said.

“Must you still go to the Leper Valley?”

“It is there I am to meet that which you once called ‘The Dweller of the Threshold,’” Rawder said.

In the silence of a moment the men regarded each other. From the ancient Hindu came the majestic Name, intoned as from a sea-beaten cavern--deep, distant, portentous. The _chela_ bowed in spirit, closing his eyes. Routledge was lost to the world for an instant--hung breathless in space, as if the world were flinging back from him like a receding wave.

“I was hoping that Sekar would not always lead you through the slums and hells of the world, Rawder,” Routledge said at last. “You caught full in the face all the perfected venoms of a New England country town, even to the persecutions of your church. You had to learn Boston under the flare of the torch. The grisly humor of American troops was your portion in the cavalry, and godless Minday your first mission. Hong Kong gave you her loathsome water-front to sweep, and you were all but murdered there, as in Minday. India has led you into the midst of her plagues and famines. You have toiled in the forefront of her misery. No brow has been too degraded by disease for your hand to cool; no death has been so triumphant that you would not bend to cover it. I thought at the last you might taste just a morsel, perhaps, of the beauty and sweetness of things, before you were lost to us beyond the Hills.... Instead, you go to the Leper Valley.”

Rawder regarded him with a grateful smile, in which there was wonderment that his friend should have remembered all this, but he spoke with gentle remonstrance, “My little services have been for the least of men because they needed them most. It did not happen that way; it was intended so. From the beginning, the only men who would listen to me were those humbled by great pain, or lost in great darkness. I do not understand even now why I should have earned the boon of a Master to abide with me. Yet he has come--and I am the happiest of men. The Leper Valley--that is but a halt on heaven’s highway.... I am the happiest of men, Routledge, my brother, yet the mightiest pain of my life has fallen upon me----”

Rawder went to the door and stood silent for several moments; then turned back to the light, his face calmer.

“I have loved you strongly, Routledge. You have been to me--the representative man. I have never known the touch of a woman’s hand, nor the eye of a woman--but for you I have felt all the great love of a man for a man. To-night, before you came, Sekar told me that only once again in this life I am to see you. It is to be after my trial in the Leper Valley. After that, I am to put away all love for you in the flesh, since it binds me to the Wheel.... This is harder for me than many Mindays, harder than service through interminable famines, harder than blows and revilings from multitudes of men, harder than any trial in the Leper Valley. To think that you must descend again into battle--you who know so well the awful sin of war--that I should have a fore-knowledge of you being maimed in the body, and to be unable to go to you--ah, nothing that I must face in the Leper Valley can haunt and torture the soul of your friend like this.”

The half had never been told before. Routledge bowed before the great devotion of this simplest and holiest man the world had shown him. In a swift gesture Rawder’s hand had passed between the eyes of the correspondent and the candle-flame. Fragile, trembling, almost transparent, it was eloquent with a beauty Routledge had never noted before. Within himself great changes were enacting.

There was _power_ in that little Rydamphur hut, power from the hidden wells of creation. It was made clear to him what force had impelled Sekar to find his _chela_. There was karma still for the ancient Hindu to work out, since he dragged his weary, grave-hungering flesh down from the peace and purity of his mountains to the burning plains of men--to take back this whitest soul of the Occident.

“Rawder,” Routledge said slowly, reverently, “It has long been a big part of my understanding--what you mean to me. I once told a lady of you--of my bravest man--and this lady watches and listens for you across the world. That I go back into battle again is quite right and inevitable. I have not yet reached Mother Earth’s graduating class. The wound which you foretell is nothing. It is good that I am to see you once more--even in the Leper Valley--though it holds you longer than I thought from the rest you have earned. As for parting, you know better than I that the word has no meaning. You know better than I that the relations between master and disciple do not end with the body, nor the relations of friend and friend. There never has lived a pure great soul, who has not glimpsed what means the emancipation from the flesh, and discerned in his high moments such joys that the strength of his soul was sternly tried in the effort to live out his allotted days. If such glimpses were given to all men, the nations would suffer from a shock of suicide such as no war nor famine ever wrought.