Routledge rides alone

The dusk was stretching out over the windy hills. There had been a skirmish that day in upper India. Two British columns which had campaigned for months apart telescoped with frightful sounds of gladness. Her Majesty’s foot-soldiers, already tightly knotted about their supper-fires, hooted the cavalrymen who were still struggling with halter-shanks, picket-lines, and mounts that pounded the turf and nickered sky-high for the feed-wagons to come in. Every puff of wind bore a new smell—coffee, camels, leather, gun-reek, cigarettes, saddle-blankets, and nameless others. To-morrow there would be a mile square of hill-pasture so tainted by man and beast that a native-bullock would starve before cropping there until the season of torrents soaked it sweet again.

The civilian correspondents grouped together for mess. There was Bingley of the Thames, respected but not loved, and rather better known as the “Horse-killer”—a young man of Napoleonic ambition and Cowperish gloom. There was Finacune of the Word, who made a florid romance of war-stuff, garnished his battle-fields with palms and ancient temples, and would no more forget his moonlight than the estimate of the number slain. Finacune made a red-blooded wooer out of the British army, and a brown, full-breasted she-devil out of the enemy. His story of the campaign was a courtship of these two, and it read like “A Passion in the Desert,” for which the Word paid him well and loved him mightily. Finacune had another inimitable peculiarity. He possessed one of those slight, natty figures which even civilized clothes cannot spoil; and he could emerge from thirty days in the field, dapper and sartorially fit as from a morning’s fox-hunt.

Then there were Feeney and Trollope and Talliaferro, who carry trays and announce carriages in this narrative, though high priests of the press and Londoners of mark.

The point of the gathering was old Jerry Cardinegh, of the Witness, by profession dean of the cult of the British word-painters of war, but a Tyrone patriot, bone and brain and passion. Just now, old Jerry was taking a dry smoke, two ounces of Scotch, commanding his servants to beat a bull-cheek into tenderloin, and adorning the part of master of ceremonies. Cardinegh wore easily a triple fame: first, and always first, for the quality of his work; second, for having seen more of war (twenty-seven campaigns since he messed with the Chinese Gordon, to this night in Bhurpal) than any other man on the planet; and third for being the father of Noreen Cardinegh, absolutely the loveliest young woman manifesting at the present time in London. The old man’s tenderness of heart for Ireland and for all that Ireland had done and failed, was known in part among the scribes and Pharisees. It had been an endless matter of humor among his compatriots. Just now Finacune remembered the stock question and launched it:

“Jerry, if England and Ireland went to war, which would be your home-office—London Witness or Dublin Contemporary?”

Cardinegh had never answered twice the same. “Neither,” he declared lightly now, extracting a can of kippered herring from Finacune’s saddle-bags, “but a captain’s tent, during such times as I wasn’t leading the Irish to glory. Have you an opener? I need a relish to cut this whiskey.”

“The old war-horse isn’t always humorous,” remarked Bingley, who was sitting apart. Bingley always sat apart, lest somebody should see his black book of notes or borrow his provisions.

Trollope turned to Finacune with a whisper. “The dean is looking ill. Have you noticed?”

Finacune nodded.

“It would be a heller if this little affair in the hills should prove the old man’s last campaign,” Trollope drawled softly.

Another figure emerged from the dusk, and Jerry Cardinegh leaped with a roar into the arms of an agile giant in a great frieze coat. For a moment it appeared as if the two were in deadly conflict. Pup-tents were unpinned, supper-kits scattered, native servants crawled off as from a duel of man-eaters, and the saintly camels lifted their heads in fresh dismay. It was a good, a relishable greeting, and the proper way for men who love each other to meet after prolonged absence.

“Arise, my children, and kow-tow to Routledge, your spiritual father!” Cardinegh commanded at last.

All but Bingley obeyed.

“Get up, you young scut,” Jerry called ominously, “or go feed with the camels.”

“I haven’t the honor of knowing the gentleman,” Bingley said without rising.

“Better read your history some more,” the dean observed, turning his back upon the young lion of the Thames. “Gentlemen,” he resumed with an oratorical pause, “behold the man whom the Gods formed for a war-correspondent—or a spy, as you like—and they tempered him in hell’s fire and holy water—the Gods. Gentlemen, this is Routledge, who knows India better than any of you know London, and he’s an American. This is Routledge, who rides alone, who stays afield in times of peace promoting wars for us—and more wars. I say, Routledge, when were you home last?”

“Sit down, you ‘damaged archangel,’” Routledge said laughingly. “I sat before your fireside in Cheer Street, London, little more than a year ago.”

Hearing the name of the newcomer, the “Horse-killer” was not slow to gain his feet. He came forward hastily, the sullenness gone from his face, giving place to a mixture of envy and admiration. He stared long and intently at the gaunt profile of Routledge. Finacune saw the look and interpreted it for his own pleasure in these words: “And so you are Routledge, the, just now, so-called greatest of all. Well, I am Bingley of the Thames. I have surpassed all the others in this campaign, and some time I shall measure wit and grit with you. Meanwhile, you are worth cultivating.” And truly enough the first words of the “Horse-killer” as he extended his hand were:

“I am Bingley of the Thames, Mr. Routledge.”

“I have both seen and heard of your work, and admired it, Mr. Bingley,” Routledge responded cordially. “It is good to know you.”

“And I have heard of you, too,” Bingley replied, to the delight of the others.

Routledge embraced several old friends, but to most he was known less in person than by reputation. He had a tendency to laugh at the Powers in the act of making war, a tendency to make the world see that war was a hang-over from the days when men ate their flesh hot from the kill, not from the fire. Veiled under all his work, and often expressed openly in a stinging line, was his conviction that war was a ghastly imposition upon the men in the ranks. This was considered by the rest as a mere mental dissipation of a truly great worker.

A certain aloofness added to the mystery and enchantment of the man. In the field, he would attach himself to some far-ranging column out for dirty work, choosing his command from an intimate knowledge of the leader and the men; to which was added a conception of India, her topography, strategies, fighters, and her methods of thought and action which could hardly be paralleled—outside of the secret service—in any British mind.

The Review invariably kept a second man at the heart of things to cover the routine, so that Routledge could follow his inclinations for hard-riding and bring in his wondrous tales of far chances, night attacks, the enemy at first hand, the faces and valor of the few who hearkened to the swish of the Reaper, the scream from inert flesh as the spirit flees away—the humor, the horror, the hell of the clash.

It is an axiom of the craft that in a platoon fighting for its life there is all the grip of human interest that appals in the collision of fifty-mile battle-fronts; and Routledge played the lesser game to the seeds. It was said of him that he could crawl into the soldier’s brain and watch the machinery falter in full blast and break down. Always you felt, as you read him, that he had a great pity for the ranker, and a great hate for the system that used him.

Where the Terrible was involved, there was a jolting energy in the descriptive powers of Routledge. Even the type which bore his messages from the field to the streets of London seemed sometimes vivid, crackling characters snapped hot from the reeking centres of war. He could make his first lines stand out in the thick Review columns like a desert sunset.

At the end of a campaign, instead of seeking the seductions of hero-worshipping London, Routledge would drift, possibly disguised, into some Indian hot-bed, there to study language, occultism, Borgian poisons, or Cleopatran perfumes. Tales of his ways and his work took the place of his presence at home in times of peace. Some traveller coming in from afar would relate how Routledge had smiled through a six-day water-famine; how Routledge had missed the native knives which find so often the source of human fountains in the dark. It was whispered, and accredited, that the Brahmins called him One; that they remembered him as great and distinguished and of sacerdotal caste in some former incarnation, and were loyal still. This is an honor so great that there are not five score men in all the occident who adequately can appreciate it. Mother India is sensitive to the warming currents of a great man, even though he be a derelict in the world.

Routledge had made the English-speaking world utter his name familiarly and to look for the same in public prints. For this reason, Finacune, with his typewriter on his lap, an American poncho spread upon the turf beneath him, his back against a stone, and a lantern at his elbow, rained a column upon his machine. Finishing the work with a half-smile, he hooted aloud:

“Oh, Routledge—see what comes o’ riding alone! In a month or six weeks, God loving the mails, the Word will publish: ‘The civilian mess was joined to-night by that young roving planet, Cosmo Routledge, who in present and former campaigns has driven straight to the source of exclusive information and pulled the hole in after him.’ Then, for a stick or two, I have discussed the great frieze coat,” Finacune added whimsically, “described the prophet’s brow, the slender hands of swift eloquence, and the sad, ineffable eyes of Routledge, born of America, a correspondent for the British, a citizen of the world, at home in India, and mystic of the wars.”

“Just add,” Cardinegh remarked meltingly, “that his heart beats for Ireland.”

That was a marvellous night. Big natures throbbed in rhythm. Whiskey as it sometimes will—the devil of it—brought out the brave and true and tender of human speech. Routledge told a bit of the story of the great frieze coat.... They were moments of trampling violence in the narrative; instants of torrid romance—to which the wearer had been a witness or a listener....

“Ah, they made cloth in those days,” old Jerry sighed. “Would you look under the collar of it for the name of the old Belfast maker?”

“It’s there, sure enough,” said Routledge, “as Tyrone is water-marked in the great Cardinegh scroll.”

Jerry did not answer for a moment. His face looked singularly white in the dark.

“The dean went back to Ireland just before we came out here this trip,” growled old Feeney, of the Pan-Anglo News Service. “It seems he couldn’t start an insurrection there, so he rushed back to the Witness office and haunted the cable-editor’s room until the Bhurpalese took pity on him and began shooting at Tommies.”

Hours passed with talk and laughter, liquor and song. It was strictly a night session of the inner section of war-painters; and in spirit the high priests of elder service trooped back to listen among the low-hanging Indian stars.... It was knee-deep in the morning hours when Routledge and Cardinegh drew apart at last. They walked out between the snoring lines, whispering:

“Jerry, what has this narrow-gauge campaign done to you? Fever or famine? You look drawn and blown and bleached.”

“I am going into the lair after this,” Cardinegh said. “The boys won’t believe it, but this is absolutely my last fling at the field. I am going home to Noreen, son, and London and the Witness may go to hell.”

There was unnatural venom in the old man’s words. His tightened hands stirred restlessly; his eyes, seen in the flare of a match as he lit a cigarette, were unquiet, alive with some torture of tension. Routledge gripped the vehement arm.

“You are oxidizing a bit too much tissue, old war-horse,” he said quietly. “You’ll want to go into the meadows for a while when you get back—but you won’t stay there. This stuff—the smell of it, as now in the dawn-dew, and the muttering formations presently”—Routledge waved his arm over the bivouac—“things like this won’t let you run long in the pasture. When the war-headings begin to grow on the front pages of the Witness, and the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand grows and blackens into a mailed fist gripping a dagger—why, you’ll be at the lane-fence nickering for harness.”

“Routledge, don’t go over all that rot again,” said the old man. “It isn’t that I’m out of strength, but I’m too full of hate to go on. I’ve always hated this smug English people, and I’m not mellowing with years. I feel it hotter and hotter—sometimes I feel it like a running incandescence inside. It leaves my brain charred and noxious—that’s the way it seems to me.... Yet, I have been one of England’s first aggrandizers. I have rejoiced in print at her victories. I have cheered with the low-browed mob, ‘God save the Queen!’ I have borne the brunt of her wars—the son of my father!”

Routledge was disturbed, but he chuckled softly. “One would think you were still a fire-brand of the Fenians, Jerry.”

“I know to whom I am talking,” was whispered queerly. “The Fenians are not dead yet—not all the Fenians.”

“When did you hear from Miss Noreen last?”

“Oh, it’s a fortnight. We ought to get mail at Madirabad.... I must write. My God, I must write!... Don’t mind me if I ramble a bit, Routledge. I drank rather plenty to welcome you back. Whiskey sizzles along my spine rather faster than once upon a time.... And you haven’t seen Noreen for——?”

“For over a year,” Routledge said.

“And you haven’t heard that they call her the most beautiful woman in London?”

“Yes, Jerry. I heard it from General Falconer at Bombay; from the Sewards in Simla; from Bleakley, who came back to Hong Kong after a year’s leave with a made-over liver and a child-wife. But then I knew it, Jerry—yes, I knew it.”

“But she burst into bloom astonishingly after you left us. She has never forgotten you, Routledge.... She is like the Irish girl who gave her to me.”

“Come on to bed, Jerry. We drive like carrion-birds across the world wherever there is blood spilt upon the ground. We’re not fit for a woman to remember.”

“The woman who gave Noreen to me—could remember and wait, son!... Ah, God, the red hells I have passed through!”

Routledge reflected upon the furious emotions which had stormed his old friend in a ten minutes’ walk. From the furnaces of British hate, he had swept to the cold caverns of gloom wherein he had laid the wife of his youth. Only four months ago he had left Cardinegh hard, full-blooded, iron-gray. The dawn showed him now a bent, ashen, darting-eyed old man, of volatile but uncentered speech. The tragedy of it all was germinating in the faculties of the younger man. Moreover, with a thrilling freshness, the night and the return to old London friends had brought back his own memories.... “She has never forgotten you, Routledge!”... Nor had he forgotten the pale, exquisite face of Noreen, large-eyed with listening under the lamp in Cheer Street. Her every change of expression recurred to him; and for each phase of the story he had related, there had been different ranges of sorrow and sympathy.

In the queer, sensitive mood, Routledge tried to put away his memories. Only a God was fit to mate with this moment’s conception of Noreen Cardinegh, as he stood with her father in the new day, already defiled by the sprawled army. He wished that he had not seen so much of war. Fate had put a volume of battles into the binding of his brain. In the very centres of his life, series upon series of the world’s late and horrible tableaux had been imprinted. Routledge was impressed with the queer thought that such pictures must dull the delicacy of a man and sear the surface of his soul, like lava over-running a vineyard of Italy.

“Will you go home after this little thing is over?” Jerry asked suddenly.

“Yes, and it won’t be long.”

“You wizard!—what do you mean?” Cardinegh muttered, with a start.

“I mean the present bubble is just about to be pricked.”

“I—at least, the boys—supposed this campaign to be but nicely on!” Cardinegh’s voice was a husky whisper, and his hand had gripped the sleeve of the other. “Tell me what you know!”

“Softly, Jerry!” The voice of Routledge was inaudible two feet from his lips. “It’s all rumor—indefinite, ungrippable, as if the clouds had whispered it—and yet there is something big behind it all. Down in Calcutta, the seats of the mighty are trembling. British India—take it from me—is too agitated by some discovery within, or revelation from without, to bother much further with a little native rebellion like this. And yet even this may have its relation to the big trouble. A native paper has dared to print this sentence—a good sentence, by the way: ‘Mother India is quivering with hatred for her white child, the British foundling!’ Would a Hindu journalist dare to print that without real or fancied backing? ‘Unauthoritative, but important if true,’ as the Review says, is my own idea. It is this: Russian spies have insinuated themselves somewhere into the arcanum of British India; the Bear has lumbered off with information that is already pulling the English forces into defense—from bigger game than the Bhurpalese. If Russia is arming the Border States and has secured information of the fire-brand sort against England—the latter is a good deal like a shorn Samson just now—throwing so much power in little Bhurpal!... Something’s askew. There’s a rival in the north.... It’s all vague, vague, but big—big as Asia!... Listen to an amateur prophet, old Ironsides: if we live three years, we’ll see a collision of fifty-mile battle-fronts!”

They were back in the civilian camp. Cardinegh did not speak, but his face was mad with excitement, his hands ungovernable.