Will Levington Comfort

“ Routledge-san! It is Charing Cross!”
Swiftly she drew tiny scissors from a pocket-case, snipped from her temple a lock of hair, tied it with a strand of its own, and thrust it into his hand.
It was light, living, warm like a bird in his palm. Her last words intoned through his dreams for many days:
“Remember, I am Noreen Cardinegh—who believes in you always—before all men—for all time. And I, too, must be brave and enduring until my work is done—and I may cross the world to find you!”
... He was standing at the curb before the great station. The carriage had turned away. ”

“ Tokyo was all awake and ominously still. A rickshaw-coolie darted out from a dark corner with his cart, and accosted her in a low, persistent way. He wheeled his cart in front of her, as he would not have dared with a native or a male foreigner—and all in a silent, alien fashion. She could not sit still to ride—pushed the rickshaw aside and sped on in the dusk. She was ill, her throat parched with waiting, her face white with waiting. The founts of her life were dry, her heart thralled with famine. Where was he for this new battle?... She passed knots of women in the streets. ”

“ Oppression in Tyrone; treachery in India; the Anglo-Japanese alliance; the Russo-Japanese war—a logical line of cause and effect running true as destiny, straight as a sunbeam through all these huge and scattered events—holding all Asia in the palm of history! Farther back, to the Kabul massacre, was to be traced the red history of this day—the mad British colonel; Shubar Khan!... And what did the future hold? If Russia called the French and Germans to her aid, England, by treaty, was called to the aid of Japan. ”

“ Never a wild rose of boyhood smelled half so sweet to Finacune as the ancient soil of Asia that moment, but he was whipped forward by certain emotions, to say nothing of Feeney and the avalanche of Japanese. They reached the edge of the grain and met the first gust of Orloff’s rifle steel. Down they went for the volleys, and that moment perceived a most amazing trick of a shell. A little knot of ten Japanese were running forward just before them when there was a sudden whistling shriek. The ten were lost for a second in a chariot of fire. When it cleared only one Japanese remained standing. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Routledge looked back upon those pure days wistfully now. It is given a man but once in this life to follow the Way. When manhood is fresh and sensitive, retaining all its delicate bloom and unhurt power; and when, full of a hunger that never falls below the diaphragm, the young man turns for Truth to the masters and sages—this is the time to choose between the world and the stars! This is the time that the world gives battle to detain the searching soul. ”

“ Years had outgrown the heritage of physical disorder. I had always noted how his thoughts formed, slowly, thoroughly, without adornment, but each thought straining his limitations to the roof of his brain. If an action were involved in any of Rawder’s thoughts, he carried out that action, as good hounds run—to the death. I saw now that wonderful look about him, that Heaven-warmed something which distinguishes a man who has great work to do in the world. Perhaps I alone could see it. They say God never sends a great soul among men without some one to recognize it. ”

“ It must be understood that Noreen’s conviction of her father’s integrity had never been shaken. It was more than a family faith. His life had been as a record accessible to all men. It did not even occur to her to build a system of reasoning upon the hypothesis of any guilt of his, even though much was strange and foreboding. She had heard her father mutter that a war would bring Routledge out of his lair. She could not forget that her father had come back from India on the day of the Reception, all consumed and brain-numbed from strain. ”

“ To save Noreen from this was the first point of his sacrifice. If her father were dead, unconfessed, and word reached her that the outcast had been seen in a certain part of Manchuria, she would come to share his hell-haunted-life—a thought which his whole manhood shunned. Moreover, if he were seen by the British, the sinister powerful fingers of the secret service would stretch toward him; in which case, if nothing worse happened, he would be driven from the terrain of war. Work was his only boon—furious, unabating, world-rousing work. ”

“ The Cossacks swept into Kuroki’s zone of fire. Feeney heard his companion breathe fast, and turned his head. The Word man was staring into the heart of the Cossack charge, his fears forgotten, fascinated unto madness. The earth roared with hoofs, and the air was rent with guns. On came the cavalry until it reached Kuroki’s point and halted it; but upon the Cossacks now from the countless Japanese skirmish-lines were hurled waves of flying metal—waves that dashed over the Russian horsemen as the sundered seas rushed together upon Pharaoh’s hosts. ”

“ I am Jerry Cardinegh’s girl—when it comes to India and Ireland. It must be that which makes me hate London.”
“England is young; India old,” said Routledge. “Many times the old can learn from the young—how to live.”
“But not how to die—and yet India has had much practice in learning how to die at the hands of the British.... We mustn’t talk about it to-day! The word famine rouses me into a savage. India famine; Irish famine; the perennial famine of the London East End!... Coming home from the wars, you must not be forced to talk about bitter things. ”

“ There was no sign of life in the Russian works, but his quick eye marked that shrapnel was emplaced on the higher mounds.... Had he lived a thousand years for the single purpose of viewing a battle—hundreds of acres of embattled thousands straining in unbridled devilment; a valley soaked and strewn with life essences, yet swarming with more raw material for murder—he could not have judged his advent better. It was the thirtieth of August—the day that Nodzu and Oku began their un-Christly sacrifices to hold Kuropatkin in the city and in front, while Kuroki flanked. ”

“ To be with him in great wanderings of gentle purport; to meet the suns and storms with calmness and cheer; constantly to toil together, helping, meditating, always together on the world’s highways, always looking toward God’s Good Hope, with thoughts in the stars, but not so lost in the stars that they missed the sorrowing by the roadside;—wandering grateful for life together, having a tear for the helpless, a smile for the beautiful, and a love for each other so vast and pure that it must needs love the world and reflect the love of God.... ”

“ 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. ”

“ One art of his that had found the heart of her was his conception of the inner loveliness of life. He caught the finer relation of things. He could love the lowliest, hunger with them, and realize in their midst the brotherhood of man. He perceived the great truths everywhere which purely physical men, of necessity, must miss. His discovery of Rawder was great with meaning to Noreen, and his adoration for those silent sacrifices which summed into a life of glory unobserved by the world. ”

“ Finacune was ragged and restless. The pale Talliaferro looked twice for his own shadow. Feeney’s dark fighting-face wasted and hardened, until it seemed hewn from a block of brown bone; and Trollope’s serene and changeless calm wrought upon Bingley’s nerves like an active poison.
These two did not pretend to speak at the last. The Horse-killer took on the look (his gray eyes were cold and immutable as corner stones, anyway) as if he would [206] spur over a sea of dead men’s faces to get a big tale and a free cable. ”

“ Shall I sit down in London or New York, and double on my whole trail so far on paper—books, editorials, special articles, long dinners beginning at eight, an hour of billiards, a desk in some newspaper office—fat, fatuous, and fixed at fifty?... Which is better, a gaunt, hungry, storm-bitten wanderer, with his face forever at the fire-lit window-panes of civilization, or a creased and cravatted master of little ceremonies within? A citizen of ordered days and nights, or an exile with the windy planet forever roaring in his skull? ”

“ His gigantic scheme accomplished, Cardinegh withered like a plant overturned in a furrow. Instead of facing the consequences with the same iron humor that he had faced the wars of his time—as he had planned for months, in the event of discovery—his great mad zeal had burned him out. He found himself old, run-down, pitiful, hungering for peace, when his young Messiah had come—praying for the imperial stimulus of English hatred in order to write a great book of the craft. ”

“ Routledge was intricately identified with the India of her mind now, and she knew that somewhere in India he was living out his exile. Always in those days and nights of watching and labor with the sleepless old man who was leaving her hourly, with the accelerated speed of a river that nears its falls, she was thrilled with the hope that Bombay or Madras or Calcutta would give her some living word of the outcast. ”

“ It made Routledge think of a dried and shrunken earth-worm which the morning heat had overtaken upon a wide pavement. Her eyelids were stretched apart now.
Sierras of tragedy are pictured in the eyes of the starving. Processes of decay are intricate and marvellous—like the impulses of growth and replenishing. There is no dissolution which so masterfully paints itself in the human eye as Hunger. The ball is lit with the expiration of the body, filled with a smoky glow of destroying tissue. ”

“ As a daughter of Jerry Cardinegh, she could not be free from something of his passion; moreover, body and brain, she was spent in his service. There were vast areas of unhealed tissue within her—the agony of a daughter of strong devotion, and the agony of a woman whose romance is mined and countermined. So it was a weary and supersensitive nature that caught its new series of impressions of Anglo-Indian life—the life of pegs and chits; men moving in a circle like those lost in the woods; men speaking of their livers as of members of the family; hot, heavy dinners ”

“ A tall figure in evening wear brushed by Routledge now, rather roughly and without apology. It was Bingley, of the Thames. For an instant Routledge was blinded—the Hindus name it well—by the red mists of passion. He had drilled himself to bear the words, had listened coldly, curiously, for the past few moments, but the actual physical contact unleashed his rage.
“I shouldn’t advise him to kill himself until he is well clear of the shores of England, Dartmore—the taint, you know!” Bingley said with a brassy smile. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Why did karma inflict starvation upon the child before the tablets had formed within him on which the lesson might be graven for his life’s direction? The son of Madan Das was but an instrument of punishment for the mother.... What wrong she must have done, according to Hindu doctrine, to him in one of the dim other lives—when she was forced to bring him into the world, the famine-world of India, forced to love him, to watch him waste with hunger, and to crawl with him in the night. Incomparable maternal tragedy. ”

“ They were warping his ship into dock, and the voices of France were thick in the night.
“Routledge, you’re evading the issue,” he muttered after a moment. “It isn’t that you must choose between one city and the wide world; nor between the desk or the saddle, a tent of skins or a compartment of brick. You can ride a camel in London or pack a folding-bed over the peaks to Llassa; you can be a tramp at home or an editor afield. It isn’t the world or not, Routledge, but—a woman or not!” ”