Routledge rides alone

Rain upon the windows. The atmosphere was heavy in the lodging, heavy from a sleepless night. Tobacco ash upon the floor; white embers in the grate; the finer ash of burned emotions in the eyes of the men. Neither had spoken for several moments.... Whose was to be the desolation of war? Was North China or China South soon to rumble with the tramp of foreign armies? Routledge put the question away among the far concerns of his mind. It was a moment now to mourn the man before him. There never had been an instant of hate for Jerry Cardinegh—perhaps, a full sweep of horror, at first, but that was gone, and in its wake was a pity of permanence.

He mourned his friend who was mad, dead. The years had wrought a ghastly trick here. Under many constellations, he had heard Cardinegh whisper his passionate hatred for England and her relation to Ireland and to India. Not a little of it Routledge himself shared. He perceived now that this passion had devoured the reason and sweetness of the old man’s mind. The Cardinegh of old days looked no longer out of these hunted, red-lit eyes. A pestilence had deranged the well-loved face. It was evil now in the fire-light—like a tampered chart. A life of brooding had vanquished the excellent humor at the last. Oppression had nursed a demon to obsess the brain and make a shudder of a good name.

“I must go,” Cardinegh said roughly. “It is my last day. This morning my final arrangements for Noreen. An hour with her—then to the war-office with the revelation. You’ll stay here, son. Stick to these walls—until Dartmore and the boys bring your glory back to you.... I can see them trooping in!... And Noreen—ah, the gladness of her!”

Routledge opened wide the windows and stood by while the morning swept in, damp, chill, but cleansing.

“Sit down a moment more, Jerry,” he said finally. “I want to ask a favor of you. It is a hard thing, a delicate thing—harder and more delicate than the thing you trusted to me, without asking. There is no other white man whom I would dare ask such a favor.”

“Out with it, son.” Cardinegh watched him wonderingly. Routledge sat down and leaned forward, a fine light in his big, calm eyes.

“I told you I had passed an interesting night, Jerry. It was more than that—a wonderful night. Thoughts have come to me that never squirmed in mortal brain before. I felt this vast moil of London—my enemy! I felt it gathering about my ears like the Tai Fung in the China sea. It was rich, incomparably rich, the stimulus of a Cæsar—this Herod-hate of seven million souls! I’ve been thinking for hours, Jerry—and I should have been writing—stuff for glory—the great book! Whiskey wouldn’t bring out such work, nor drugs, nor Yogi asceticism. I have glimpsed such work in stars, in battle-smoke, in bivouac fires, in the calm and distances of the monster Himalayas; perhaps in the eyes of women—but glimpses only, Jerry! To-night it came like a steady stream of empyrean fire. I want months of it—months! I would pay half my life to have London and the army hating me this way until the work is done. It’s the stuff that sings in the veins of kings. Give it to me—for the book!”

“Wake up! You fool—wake up!”

“Listen, old champion,” Routledge went on passionately: “I have spent this life gathering the data of experience. I have crossed the Sahara in the hue and garb of a camel driver; I have lain months a yellow Mohammedan in the huts of Lahore; as a Sannyasi, I have trudged up to the roof of the world. And the fighting, Jerry—Pathan, Zulu, and Burmese; and the revolts—Afghan, Balkan, Manipur, African, Philippine—all these came back, vivid, splendid last night—pictures fit to gild and garnish the Romance of the Open. And, Jerry, I have peered into the mystic lore of India, the World’s Mother—subtly and enticingly to color it all! I want to do this, Jerry, the Book of our Tribe! I shall write it in blood, with pillars of fire leaping up for chapter-heads—if you will only leave this flood of power in my veins—the Hate of London!”

Cardinegh, gasping, clutched his hand. “One of us—you or I—is mad——”

“Mad, of course,” laughed Routledge. “A man must be a little mad with the inspiration of Keats and the punch of Carlyle banging together in his brain.”

Hope lived wildly now in Cardinegh’s eyes. “And while you are doing the book,” he muttered, “I am to live out your tinsel and truffles here, play the grizzled warrior—led about by the child of her mother.... Routledge—Routledge, your brand of stimulus is new and raw.”

“I’m tolerated to ordinary poisons, Jerry. A man immersed in gentle azure can’t get the other pigments out of his brain.”

Cardinegh arose. “It’s sweet heaven to me,” he murmured strangely, with quivering lips. “It is a rest such as I have never known. I never was ready to rest until now, until to-day—when I thought the chance was burned away. You want to take this?”

“Yes.”

“Months of life—Home, Noreen!... Damme, Routledge—I’m broken! It’s like you, Routledge—it’s like you——”

“To me it’s a gift of the gods! Hold on, Jerry, until I bring back the Book—hold on and sit tight!”

Cardinegh left the lodging and Bookstalls, bewildered by his new possession of days. The strain that had kept him afoot until the end; that had stiffened his body and faculties for the end itself; carrying him step by step from the Khyber Hills, through the Bhurpal campaign (the days in which he had watched the results of the fire he had started); the strain that had roused his personal craft to baffle and disarm those men of uncanny keenness at Naples, and pulled him up for a last rally in London—was lifted now, and with it relaxed the substance of his brain and body. Doubtless, he would have preserved his acumen upstanding, and an unsnapped nerve, to bid Noreen farewell and make his confession at the War-Office to-day—but there was no need!

The old man walked along mumbling, forgetting the while to hail a cab. The miracle of it all, though it did not appeal to him, was that he had lost his ruling, destroying hatred for England. Cheer Street and Noreen—the blessedness of her hand to help him; her touch so like her mother’s upon his brow; the eyes of her mother across the table—months of life, of rest, of Home and Noreen!... These were his thoughts. There was no room for world-politics, for war, for passion. Even the thing which Routledge had done hovered in the background. It was a piece of inhuman valor, almost too big to hold fast to. Routledge was identified in his brain now with the stirring braveries of days long gone; with other sunlights in which men met the shock of things in full manhood; it was of another, of a ruddier, world to old Jerry’s eyes to-day.... In a remote way, he felt that once he might have revelled in the hate of London. Perhaps it was one of the things peculiar to the middle distances of manhood—as far from the comprehension of the elders as of the children. That there was an element of sacrifice in the action of Routledge was not entirely lost to Cardinegh, but he put it away among the misty glories of memory—days when manhood was in its zenith of light and power. It was not of the present; it had nothing to do with the numbness and the swift, painless softening of to-day.

“Noreen!” he called, at the front door in Cheer Street.

A servant told him that Noreen had been away for an hour.... With a startled look, the servant drew a chair close to the fire for the old man, poured a grog for him, set his smoking things to hand, and backed staring out of the room.... Hours afterward, Noreen found him there—the glass, the pipes, the daily papers untouched. His smile was like something which the wind had blown awry. His eyes were depleted of fire, of fury. Even the starry worship which her presence had reflected in them yesterday was dimmed—as were the mighty images of the wars in his brain.... He roused at the sight of her, started to speak of Routledge, halted, reflected, then drank.

“Hold a match to my pipe, child. It was your mother’s way. You’ve been gone the long while, deere.”

She obeyed. The majesty of pain was upon her face as she hurried away. Locked in her own room, long afterward, she heard him humming quaveringly an old Irish folk-song—lost from her brain a dozen years.