Routledge rides alone

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.

“We will both go gladly to our work. I see my mission clearly to-night. It is to scoff at war before men; to show what a monstrous activity it is for men; to show how black is the magic of the ambitious few, who dare to make cannon-meat of God’s multitudes. I, the watcher of many services, who am supposed to bow before the battle-lines, and carve my career from their triumphs and defeats, shall laugh at their untimely and ridiculous manifestations. At the last, I shall paint war so red, so real, in all its ghastly, abortive reality, that the nations shall shudder—as at the towering crime on Calvary—shudder to the quick of their souls, and sin no more!”

The moment was exalted. Something vaster, nobler, than mere human consciousness expanded within Routledge.... He saw the pitiful pawns thronging to fill the legions of Cæsar, who stooped to learn the names of certain of his centurions. He saw that black plague, Napoleon, and the regiments herding for slaughter under his glaring, spike-pointed eye; great masses of God-loved men vying to die swiftly at a word from that iron-rimmed cavern of desolation, Napoleon’s mouth—the mouth which deigned to utter from time to time the names of chiefs he counted upon presently to murder. Cæsar and Napoleon, incarnates of devilish ambition, mastodons of licensed crime, towering epileptics both.... He hungered for the time when the world would learn to bottle such admirable concentrates of hell-poison before they shamed humanity by driving poor group-souled masses first mad and then into the ignoble death of war.

“It has been a high night to me, Rawder,” Routledge said. “I am proud to thank you for showing me my work. And I can see yours on and on—even to the Leper Valley.... Strange, Rawder, but there is a picture with it, in my mind—a picture that has always come to me in high, hard moments.... Nightfall—a land of hills and heat, and a dusty, winding highway. The Christ passes in the midst of a throng. He is weary, athirst, and hungering. The empty voices of the crowd bind His thoughts to misery. The pitiful ways of men have put a martyrdom of sadness in His heart. At length above the whispering of feet on the warm sand, above the Babel of the followers, comes to His ear alone a moan from the darkness. It thrills with agony. He leaves the highway. The throng understands. They pull at His garments and cry, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ Even the leper lying in the darkness warns Him, ‘Unclean!’ as is the law.... But the beautiful Christ bends with the touch of healing!...

“I shall come to find you in the Leper Valley, my bravest man. And you shall go on after that to the great peace that is ‘mortised and tenoned’ in the granite of the Hills!... But, Rawder, you shall look back out of the glorious amplitude beyond the Leper Valley to find at last that your friend is nearly ready. Perhaps you will come for him—even as Sekar came for you.”

With a quick intaking of breath, the material consciousness of the Hindu returned.

“It is the hour,” he said to his chela. “We travel in the night.”

Again the fleeting look of agony across the white face of Rawder, but Routledge gripped his shoulder, and spoke to Sekar:

“It is a little thing, but I have plenty of money, if you need it. Would you not travel—at least, out of the region of great heat—in the fire-carriages of the English? A fortnight’s journey each daylight?”

The Sannyasi answered: “The beloved of my disciple has earned many favors. It has been made clear to me that we must travel alone and on foot. I am very old, but there is still strength for the journey—or I should not have been sent.”

He stretched out his hand—it was like a charred branch—and Routledge bent his head for the blessing.

“You have chosen well, beloved of my chela. It is the shorter, steeper way you tread. This life you have dedicated to the service of men, and you are bound to the Wheel by the love of woman. Fulfil the duties all, and the way shall be quickened. Once more our paths shall meet—and there shall be four—in the Leper Valley!”

Rawder poured a cup of water upon the aged feet, dried them with a cloth, and drew the sandals firm.

“Night and morning I shall send you my blessing, Routledge, my brother,” he said, standing near the door. “Morning and evening, until we meet again in the Leper Valley, you shall know that there is a heart that thrills for the good of your life and your soul. Good-by.”

They passed out into the torrid night. Their white garments turned to gray; then dulled into shadows, northward on the dust-deep Indian road.