Routledge rides alone

Jerry Cardinegh, dean of the British word-painters of war, was just home from China, where he had caught the Allies in the act of relieving Peking. It had been a goodly and enticing service, both to watch and to portray, calling out much of glorious color and tension and peril, and not enough slaughter to chill the world’s appreciation. Cardinegh sat by the fire in his little house in Cheer Street, London, and was ministered to by his daughter, Noreen, a heavenly dispensation which the old campaigner believed he had earned. A dinner together, just the two, truly a feast after lean months crossing the mountains of separation. Then whiskey, glasses, soda, pipes, tobacco, papers of the afternoon--all served by the dearest of hands. The gray, hard veteran lived, indeed, the maiden filling his eyes.

Twenty he had left her, and she was twenty still, but the added fraction of an inch made her look very tall, and startled him. There was a mysterious bloom under the luminous pallor of her skin; fathoms more added to the depth of her eyes, and a suggestion of volume to her voice. Nature and heritage had retouched the girlish lips in color and curve, widened the tender Irish eyes, added glow and amplitude to the red-gold hair.... There had only been two women in the world for Jerry Cardinegh, and the other was a memory--the mother.

“And who do you suppose is coming to-night, deere?” he asked. There was a silver lining of the Tyrone tongue to all that Jerry said, but it was so subtle and elusive as wholly to defy English letters, save possibly that one word “deere” which he rolled fondly for Noreen, and here and there in the structure of a sentence.

“Some of your war-men to relieve Peking again to-night? Who, father?”

“Just one. The best and weirdest of them all. He’s on the way home to the States. You met him in Tokyo five years since--after the Japanese had whipped China, and the Triple Alliance had stepped in to gobble the trophies.”

The girl stirred the fire in the grate thoughtfully for an instant, then started up in a glad, impatient way. “Routledge-san?”

“The same. Now, that’s queer--after five years--I mean, the Japanese title of address--‘Routledge-san.’”

“That’s what I used to call him, and I always think of him so. I think of him a great deal. His work in the Review makes me. He is one of very few whom I could welcome gladly--this first home-night with you, father.” She spoke with the old fearless candor that Cardinegh loved.

“So you think of Routledge a great deal? And why, deere?”

“He sees deeply. His work is illuminating to me. Sometimes I think of him sitting back of his work and smiling because he knows so much that he dares not set down. I think Routledge-san loves Asia--as you, as we--love Ireland, father.”

“You could not think about a better man, Noreen,” said Cardinegh. “And so he knows a lot that he doesn’t write for the Review? Well, maybe so.... He talks quite as well as he writes--when the spell is on him. I don’t know a man who can clear a mind of all save what he’s tossing into it--like Routledge. And the words seem to twist and work their way deep like burrs--when he leans forward with an idea.”

Noreen smiled. “And why has he not been back to London in all these years?”

“You have said it--because he loves Asia.”

“But he has not been back to America?”

“Routledge is quite as much at home in London as in Philadelphia, his native city. He has worked for the American press as well as for the English. You see, he needed us because England has something doing more or less all the time in the field. In fact, since Japan took the Chinese Port Arthur in ’94, there has been plenty for one man to do in following American and British arms--Cuba, South Africa, the Philippine Archipelago, and now China again. But I have met him off and on around the world. They are good men of our tribe, Noreen, strong, brave, and wise men, but Routledge, of them all, has warped his craft deepest into my slip, so to speak. I love the lad.”

She was moving about among the shadows of the sitting-room--a touch of her hand here and there, unconscious preparation, probably, for the guest, and a queer tension in her eyes. It was nine, and a gusty winter night, when Cardinegh admitted the world-wanderer and took his great frieze coat. Noreen watched from the far end of the hall. Routledge spoke low and laughingly, and caught the elder man by the hand and shoulder. A sense of exhilaration in full sweep dilated the veins of the girl, and with it, too, was a certain chill of dread, some nameless portent--a blend of joy, and its price in pain, all in that first glimpse. It was like the prelude of a song, or the prologue of a story, which contains an element of each emotion in the appeal of the whole....

“And this is Noreen--the little Noreen whom I once dared to call my Japanese sweetheart. Why, it’s water out of the rock to see you again, Miss Noreen!... Jerry, the years have been consummate artists here in Cheer Street while we’ve been away growing old.”

Noreen heard herself saying, “I have felt close to you a great many times, Routledge-san,--all wrapped up, as in a blanket, in those fat Review columns under your name.”

“’Tis true,” said Cardinegh. “We’re all flawful imitations beside you, son.”

“I was thinking how good, how ripping good, ‘Routledge-san’ sounds again,” the guest declared. “It’s like a song of home heard from a passing ship.”

Before the fire, the two correspondents unshipped once more under the guns of the Taku forts, for the listening girl, and followed the Pei-ho, that roiled drain of a bitter land, up to the Tientsin wall.

“Routledge deserted us that day--went back to his own countrymen--the American column,” said the father.

Jerry wanted the story told for Noreen, and his memories challenged and animated Routledge. “Yes, I wanted to see my boys again,” he acknowledged. “I had one good look at them in Cuba, under Lawton, who was killed a year or so later, under my eyes, on the banks of the Maraquina River in Luzon. The Philippines was a rapid, pretty service, but a service of detachments. I was eager to see how the boys worked in numbers. The American troops are nervous, you know, a little too highly evolved to be atoms. They live for a higher game in their country--commerce and inventions. Some time the nation will rise even to a better growth than that--I mean, to the spiritual evolution.

“The boys were mostly ill in China, thin-blooded from the tropical Philippines. The column was full of fever, coughing and cursing a little. They shook in the chill damps of the nights up Tientsin way.... Poor chaps, but it was good to hear them talk, before the gray old walls of Tientsin--that night when the world was hanging to the cable-ends for the flash, ‘battle.’ I rode along the huddled column and heard Texas, Indiana, Nob Hill and the Bronx, Halsted Street and Back Bay--all from the shadows on the ground, that breathed tired oaths and shivered in the drive of the fine, chilled rain.”

Jerry took up the picture excitedly: “Do you remember when the spray of sparks shook out from behind the wall?--the party in charge of the fireworks was trying the night to see if it were dark enough. Then followed a succession of booming crashes. It was as if the plain was drawn tight as a drum-head, and they dropped comets on it.... The Chinos got the Russian range about that time, and left open sores in the snaky Slav line. And I want to know, Routledge, did you hear the high-pitched scream from the Japanese when they snatched the glory of the lead?... Ah, we’ll hear from those brown dwarfs again!”

“I think so,” said Routledge. “They ran forward like hounds, snapped at each other and gave tongue like a pack closing in for the kill. Yes, I remember, and then the fire broke out behind the wall in the native city, and the sky took on the red--the red of an Indian blanket! It shone red on the faces of the boys from the States.... Miss Noreen, you listen large-eyed as Desdemona.”

“Tell me more about your boys,” she whispered.

“The trumpet screeched ‘forward,’ and the column quickened into life,” Routledge explained, “sprang like magic into formation and swept past, panting, laughing, shouting in the rain. God, pity them! They were good boys--good boys, all. I wish they had all come back with their dreams all turned true.... They didn’t know what was ahead, except they had seen the blind gray stones of the wall through the dusk at the end of the day’s march. They didn’t know what the fight was about, but they ran to break the wall, gladly, against the rock of centuries--into fire and steel and the yellow hate from all the hells. It meant nothing to them after the wall was broken. That’s the queer, ugly part of it. The man in the ranks always gets the worst end--and so pitifully often doesn’t even have a sentiment to enthuse over. He’s apt to fall in a fight against as good friends as he has anywhere on this spinning planet, and what meaning has the change of national boundaries to his mother?” Routledge was thoughtful for a moment....

“It seems hard to use grown-ups like that--men, white men, with spines at right-angles from the snake’s, and a touch of eternity in their insides somewhere. Poor devils, getting the worst of it--that’s always the way!... I watched the tail of the column swaying by--watched the last fragments blotted up in the rain and the night. Already, in a red mist on the Tientsin Wall the dance of death had begun.”

Noreen’s eyes were filled with mysteries and mistiness. As in his work, Routledge now suggested to her volumes unsaid. Her heart sensed the great wealth of the man. She felt an inner expansion. Pity was almost a passion in his face; and there was hate, too--hate for the manipulations of the rulers of the earth, which drove forward that poor column cursing and coughing in the rain. She saw it all--as if she had been at his side that night--the fire-lit field running with the reddest blood of earth. And across the world she seemed to see the faces of the maids and mothers of these boys--faces straining toward them, all white with tragedy. And more, she seemed to see for an instant the Face of the high God, averted from His images, because they were obsessed in that profane hour by the insane devils of war.... The profile of Routledge fascinated her. He had spoken lightly--as he was accustomed to speak before men to whom war was a career--but the aroused girl saw in his eyes, tightly drawn against the lamp-light, a mystic’s rebellion against the inhumanity of material power. About his eyes and graven entire upon the tropically embrowned face was a look impossible to the men her life had known.