TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTERROUTLEDGE, BROODING UPON THE MIGHTY SPECTACLE OF A JAPANESE BIVOUAC, TRACES A WORLD-WAR TO THE LEAK IN ONE MAN’S BRAIN
Partingfrom Noreen Cardinegh on the Bund at Shanghai, Routledge walked back through the darkness to the German Inn far out on the Hankow road. He was not conscious of the streets, nor of time passed. Not a word he had spoken to the woman could he remember, but all that she had said recurred again and again. He was torn within. The wound was too deep for heavy pain at first—that would come later with the drawing-together—but he was dazed, weakened. He turned into the door of the hostelry and recalled that he had nothing to do there. He had engaged passage on theSungkiangfor Chifu that afternoon. His baggage was aboard, and the ship lying on the water-front which he had left. He turned back, without any particular emotion at his absentmindedness, but he charged himself with an evil recklessness for tarrying on the Bund in the afternoon.... Finacune had seen him, and Noreen....
Jerry Cardinegh was still alive—lost to wars, lost to friends, but still alive. He was close to death, his brain probably already dead to big things, and he had not told! Noreen would never know. Routledge tried to be glad. All his praying, hiding, and suffering had been to save her from knowing. His lips formed a meaningless declarative sentence to the effect that he was glad;meaningless, because there was no sanction in his heart. He was ill and very weary. He wished it were time for the prophesied wound, and for Noreen to come to him. He was not powerful enough that moment, walking back to the Bund, to face the future, and hold the thought that he was to remain an outcast....
“She will come to me when Jerry is dead,” he repeated, and for the time he could not fight it.... He went aboard, forgetting dinner, and dropped upon his berth. TheSungkiangput off, out into the river, and long afterward lifted to the big swell in the offing. These were but faint touches of consciousness. His mind held greater matters—the strength of her hand, the breath, the fragrance, the vehemence, the glory of the woman in the wintry dusk, as she rushed back to her work—the tearing tragedy of parting; again the pitiless mountains of separation....
Loose articles were banging about the floor; the pendent oil-lamp creaked with the pitching of the ship. It was after midnight. Routledge caught up the great frieze coat and went out on the main-deck. It was a cold ruffian of a night, but it restored his strength.
She would keep her promise and come to him, when her father was dead. He faced the thought now that she would never know the truth; that Jerry Cardinegh would have spoken long since, if he could.... In some deep dark place of the earth, she would find him; and some British eye, ever keen, would see them together—the lady and the outcast.... He would send her away—put on a martyrdom of frost and steel—and send her away.... If he lied, saying that he wanted no woman—she would go back.... But Noreen wasto find him wounded, fallen. Might he not, in delirium, utter the truth that her father failed to confess? No, the human will could prevent that! He would go down close to the very Gates with his lips locked.
“... I shall take care of your life for you—even in the Leper Valley!” Routledge thought he must be mad to imagine those words. Her face—as the words came to him—had been blotted out in the snow and the dark; yet it was her voice, and the words rang through his soul. She could not have seen Rawder nor the Hindu. They were lost in Northern India. He knew nothing of Jasper having passed the hut in Rydamphur that night, nor of his meeting with Noreen on ship-board. The Leper Valley, hidden in the great mountains of Southern China, was scarcely a name to the world. Could Noreen have heard the name, and used it merely as a symbol of speech for the uttermost parts of the earth? This was the only adjustment of the mystery upon a material basis.
He fought it all out that night in the icy gale on the main-deck of theSungkiang, and entered upon the loneliest, harshest campaign and the bleakest season of his life.... Often it came to him with a great, almost an overpowering surge—the passion to look into the eyes of Noreen Cardinegh again and to stand among men, but he fought it with the grim, immutable fact that he had taken her father’s crime and must keep it, stand by it, with his dearest efforts until the end. If fate destined some time to lift the burden—that was resistless.... Except in bringing in his stories to the cables, he passed the spring and summer in the deepest seclusion.
This he knew: if he were seen by any of his old friends among the English, the word would be carried to Jerry Cardinegh, who, if still alive, might be stirred to confession. 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. God so loved the world that he gave unto poor forlorn man his work.... No more loitering on Bunds or Foreign Concessions for Cosmo Routledge.
From various Chinese bases, he made flying incursions into the war-belt for theWorld-News—a lonely, perilous, hard-shipping, and hard-riding service, but astonishingly successful. It was his flash from Chifu which told New York that the war was on before the declaration. This was on the night of February eighth. A strong but not a roaring west wind brought Togo’s firing across the gulf. He chanced a message and verified it before dawn by an incoming German ship, which had steamed past the fortress when the Russian fleet was attacked.
Again, he was with the Russians at Wangcheng before the port was closed, and got the story of the Yalu fight. This through John Milner, the American consul at Wangcheng, in whom he made a staunch and valuedfriend, regretting that it was necessary to do so under the name of “A. V. Weed.” Milner was an oldWorld-Newseditor, a man of stirring energy, and strong in the graces of the Russians at his post. He was ardent to serve all American interests, and theWorld-Newsin particular. He presented Routledge to General Borodoffsky, who told the story of the battle; and there was a fine touch in the fact that the general wept as he related the Russian defeat. The story proved more complete and accurate than any which the correspondents with Kuroki managed to get through the Japanese censor. Kuroki’s great losses by drowning were for the first time brought out. Borodoffsky declared with tears that the future of the war must not be judged by this battle, as the Russian defeat was due entirely to an error of judgment. Routledge was leaving Wangcheng with the story when two British correspondents arrived. This prevented his return. The Borodoffsky story was filed in Shanhaikwan.
In a sea-going junk, the third week of May, Routledge crossed the Liaotung Gulf, hoping to get into Port Arthur, which was not yet invested. Instead, he stumbled onto the Nanshan story. From the northern promontory of Kinchow he caught a big and valuable conception of this literatesque engagement of the land and sea forces, and returned with it to Chifu for filing.
Back to lower Liaotung again, in early June. In spite of every precaution, one of Togo’s gunboats ran him down in Society Bay, and he was sent ashore under a guard. Great luck served him, inasmuch as there were no English with the Japanese at this place, Pulatien, where he was held for ten days, while the officers debatedupon his credentials. It was here that Routledge encountered the prettiest feature-story of the war—the duel of Watanabe and Major Volbars, a prisoner from Nanshan. The Japanese escorted him to his junk at last, and he put off with orders from one of Togo’s ensigns to return no more to Kwantung waters. The battle of Telissu was fought on this day at sea, and he missed it entirely. With English now in Wangcheng and Chifu, Routledge ordered his Chinese to sail north, and to put him ashore at Yuenchen, a little port twenty miles to the west of the Liao’s mouth.
It was only by a squeak that the order was carried out. That was a night of furies on the yellow gulf. Bent in the hold, thigh-deep in tossing water, Routledge recalled the hovel in Rydamphur with a sorry smile. It did not seem at that moment that the storm would ever permit him to be maimed on land—or a woman to come to him. The old craft was beaten about under bare poles in a roaring black that seemed to drop from chaos. The Chinese fought for life, but the gray of death-fear was upon them. Bruised, almost strangled, Routledge crouched in the musty hold, until his mind fell at last into a strange abstraction, from which he aroused after an unknown time. His physical weariness was extreme, but it did not seem possible that he could have slept, standing in black, foaming water, and with a demoniacal gale screeching outside. Yet certainly something had gone from him and had taken his consciousness, or the better part of it.... It was this night that Noreen Cardinegh had entered at dusk her little house in Minimasacuma-cho and met by the easel the visible thought-form of her lover.
Day broke with the wind lulled, and the old craft riding monster seas, her poles still to the sky. The daylight sail brought him to Yuenchen; from whence he made his way northward by land to Pingyang. This town was but an hour’s saddle to the east of the railroad and telegraph at Koupangtze—twenty miles west of the junction of the Taitse and the Liao river, and fifty miles west of Liaoyang. Here he established headquarters completely out of the white man’s world, rested and wrote mail stories for several weeks. Toward the end of July, he set out on a ten days’ saddle trip toward Liaoyang, with the idea of becoming familiar with the topography of the country, in preparation for the battle, already in sight. It was on this trip that he was hailed one afternoon by an American, named Butzel. This young man was sitting on the aft-gunnel of a river-junk, rolling a cigarette, when Routledge turned his horse upon the Taitse river-road, four or five miles to the east of the Liao. Routledge would have avoided the meeting had he been given a chance, but Butzel gaily ordered his Chinese to put ashore. The voice was that of a man from the Middle States—and Routledge filled with yearning to take a white hand. His only friend since he had left Rawder in India was Consul Milner at Wangcheng.
Butzel had journeyed thus deep into the elder world—as natural an explorer as ever left behind his nerves and his saving portion of fear. He hadn’t any particular credentials, he said, and hadn’t played the newspaper game very strongly up to now. The Japanese had refused to permit him to go out with any of the armies; and he had tried to get into Port Arthur with a junk, but Togo had driven him off. He had very little money,and was tackling China to get to the Russian lines. It was his idea for the Russians to capture him, and, incidentally, to show him how they could defend Liaoyang. In a word, he was eluding Japan, bluffing his way through the interior of China, and about to enforce certain hospitality from the Russians. A great soul—in this little man, Butzel.
Routledge delighted in him, but feared for his life. He himself was playing a similar lone-hand, but he carried Red-beard insignia, purchased at a big price; and when he had ventured into a river or sea-junk, he had taken pains to arrange that his receipt for a certain extortion was hung high on the foremast. Thus was he ever approved by the fascinating brotherhood of junk pirates. These were details entirely above the Butzel purse and inclination. The two men parted in fine spirit after an hour, the adventurer urging his Chinese up the Taitse toward the Russian lines. He was not so poor as he had been, and he yelled back joyously to Routledge that there wasn’t enough trails in this little piker of a planet to keep them from meeting again.
His words proved true. Poor Butzel rode back in state that afternoon, his head fallen against the tiller and a bullet hole in his breast. Even his clothing had been taken. The junk was empty except for the body. With a heavy heart, Routledge attended to the burial and marked the spot. That night he rode to Koupangtze, and, by paying the charges, succeeded in arranging for a brief message to be cabled to theWorld-News; also a telegram to the American consul at Shanghai.
So much is merely a suggestion of the work that told for his paper that summer. For weeks at a time hewas in the saddle, or junking it by sea and river. Except when driven to the telegraph, he avoided every port town and every main-travelled road. He was lean, light but prodigiously strong. A trencherman of ordinary valor would have dragged out a hateful existence of semi-starvation upon the rations that sufficed for Routledge; and none but a man in whom a giant’s strength was concentrated could have followed his travels. The old Manchurian trails burned under his ponies; and, queerly enough, he never ruined a mount. He had left Shanghai on the first of February, ill from confinement, the crowds, and his long sojourn in the great heat of India. The hard physical life at sea in the Liao gulf and afield in Manchuria, and, possibly more than anything, his life apart from the English, restored him to a health of the finest and toughest texture.
China challenged him. He never could feel the tenderness of regard for the Yellow Empire that India inspired, but it held an almost equal fascination. China dwelt in a duller, more alien light to his eyes; the people were more complicated, less placable and lovable, than Hindus, but the same mysterious stillness, the same dust of ages, he found in both interiors; and in both peoples the same imperturbable patience and unfathomable capacity to suffer and be silent. Routledge moved in towns almost as unknown to the world as the Martian surfaces; learned enough of the confusion of tongues to procure necessities; supplied himself with documents, bearing the seals of certain dark fraternities, which appeared to pass him from place to place without harm: and, with a luck that balanced the handicap of an outcast, and an energy, mental and physical, utterly impossibleto a man with peace in his heart, he pushed through, up to Liaoyang, an almost incredible season’s work.
More and more the thought was borne upon him during July and August that the coming big battle would bring to him a change of fortune—if only a change from one desolation to another. He felt that his war-service was nearing its end. He did not believe that Liaoyang was to end the war, but he thought it would close the campaign for the year; and he planned to conclude his own campaign with a vivid intimate portrait of the battle. Meanwhile he hung afar from the Russian and Japanese lines, and little Pingyang had a fire lit for him and a table spread when he rode in from his reconnoissance.
Late in August, when the artillery began, Routledge crossed to the south bank of the Taitse with a pair of good horses, and left them about two miles to the west of the city with a Pingyang servant who had proven trustworthy. On the dawn of the thirtieth he made a wide detour behind Oku, nearly to Nodzu’s lines, and watched the battle from Sha peak—one of the highest points of the range. He had studied Liaoyang long through the intricate Chinese maps; and as the heights had cleared the fighting-field for Bingley, so now did Routledge grasp the topography from his eyrie during that first day of the real battle. Similarly also, he hit upon Kuroki’s flank movement as the likeliest strategy of the Japanese aggression, and he came to regard it as a fact before starting for the free cable at Wangcheng the following night.
This day netted nothing in so far as the real battle color was considered. That night he closed up on Oku’srear, crossing a big valley and climbing a lesser range. Daylight found him in a densely thicketed slope overlooking the city and the Japanese command. In that hot red dawn, he beheld the bivouac of the Islanders—a crowded valley stretching away miles to the east in the fast lifting gloom; leagues of stirring men, the faint smell of wood-smoke and trampled turf, the gray, silent city over the reddened hills, the slaty coil of the river behind.
The mighty spectacle gripped the heart of the watcher; and there came to him, with an awful but thrilling intensity, the whole story of the years which had prepared this amphitheatre for blood on this sweet last summer day.... 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. America might be drawn by the needs of England, or for the protection of her softening cluster of Philippine grapes. Famine in a Tyrone town; a leak in one Tyrone patriot’s brain—and a world-war!...
The click of a rifle jerked Routledge out of his musings. A Japanese lieutenant and a non-commissioned officer were standing twenty paces away. The enlisted man had him covered.