Routledge rides alone

by Will Levington Comfort

The article was rock-tight and bitter with the Dead Sea bitterness. The pressure of the whole senile East was in it. The woman quivered from a pain the prints had given her, and moved out of the darkened office into the strange road, thick and yellow with heat.... Could this be Rawder and his Hindu master?... It occurred to her suddenly that the men of the newspaper might be able to tell her of the Leper Valley. She turned back to the office, was admitted to the editor.... No, he had not heard of the Leper Valley. There were leper colonies scattered variously throughout the interior. It might be one of them.... She thanked him and went away, leaving a problem to mystify many sleepy, sultry days.... That night, Noreen engaged passage in a coasting steamer for Tongu, and on the morning of the third day thereafter boarded the Peking-Shanhaikwan train on the Chinese Eastern.

Alone in a first-class compartment, she watched the snaky furrows of maize throughout seven eternities of daylight, until her eyes stung and her brain revolted at the desolate, fenceless levels of sun-deadened brown. Out of a pent and restless doze, at last she found that a twilight film had cooled the distance; she beheld the sea on her right hand, and before her the Great Wall—that gray welt on the Eastern world, conceived centuries before the Christ, rising into the dim mountains and jutting down into the sea. In an inexplicable moment of mental abstraction, as the train drew up to Shanhaikwan, the soul of the weary woman whispered to her that she had seen it all before.

At the Rest House, Noreen ventured to inquire of a certain agent of a big British trading company if he knew any of the English or American war-correspondents who had come recently to Shanhaikwan to file their work on the uncensored cable. This man was an unlovely Englishman poisoned by China and drink.... Oh, yes, some of the men had come in from the field or from Wangcheng with big stories, but had trouble getting back to their lines, it was said.

“Have you heard—or do you know—if Mr. Routledge has been here?”

His face filled with an added inflammation, and he mumbled something which had to do with Routledge and the treachery in India.

“Do you mean to say,” she demanded hopelessly, “that you—that Shanhaikwan has not heard that Mr. Routledge had nothing to do with the treachery in India—that another, Cardinegh of the Witness, confessed the crime on his death-bed?”

The Englishman had not heard. He bent toward her with a quick, aroused look and wanted to know all, but she fled to her room.... It was not strange if Routledge failed to hear of his vindication, when this British agent had not.... By the open window she sat for hours staring at the Great Wall in the moonlight. She saw it climb through the white sheen which lay upon the mountains, and saw it dip into the twinkling sea, like a monster that has crawled down to drink. There were intervals when Shanhaikwan was still as the depths of the ocean. The whole landscape frightened her with its intimate reality. The thought came again that this had once been her country, that she had seen the Mongol builders murdered by the lash and the toil.

The purest substance of tragedy evolved in her brain. There had been something abhorrent in contact with the Englishman below. She had seen a hate for Routledge like that before—at the Army and Navy reception! And then, the sinister narrative of the white man in India, as it had been set down by the English correspondent!... Could this be “their bravest man”? Was he, too, attracting hatred and suspicion in India, as a result of the excitement into which her father’s work had thrown the English? Could not poor Rawder, barefoot, travel-bruised, and wearing a motley of native garments, be free from this world-havoc which was her heritage?... That instant in the supremacy of pain she could not feel in her heart that Routledge wanted her—or that he was in the world!... Could he be dead, or in the Leper Valley? Had his mind gone back to dust—burned out by these terrible currents of hatred?...

The pictured thought drew forth a stifled scream. The lamp in her room was turned low, and the still, windless night was a pitiless oppression. Crossing the room to open the door, in agony for air, she passed the mirror and saw a dim reflection—white arms, white throat, white face. She turned the knob.

The clink of glasses on a tin-tray reached her from below, with the soft tread of a native servant; then from farther, the clink of billiard-balls and a man’s voice, low but insinuating, its very repression an added vileness: