Routledge rides alone

“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 ‘Besant’, like the author, but as if it were spelled ‘Bessant.’ 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 “Bessant,” 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?”

“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.