“I am Bingley of the Thames, Mr. Routledge.”
“I have both seen and heard of your work, and admired it, Mr. Bingley,” Routledge responded cordially. “It is good to know you.”
“And I have heard of you, too,” Bingley replied, to the delight of the others.
Routledge embraced several old friends, but to most he was known less in person than by reputation. He had a tendency to laugh at the Powers in the act of making war, a tendency to make the world see that war was a hang-over from the days when men ate their flesh hot from the kill, not from the fire. Veiled under all his work, and often expressed openly in a stinging line, was his conviction that war was a ghastly imposition upon the men in the ranks. This was considered by the rest as a mere mental dissipation of a truly great worker.
A certain aloofness added to the mystery and enchantment of the man. In the field, he would attach himself to some far-ranging column out for dirty work, choosing his command from an intimate knowledge of the leader and the men; to which was added a conception of India, her topography, strategies, fighters, and her methods of thought and action which could hardly be paralleled—outside of the secret service—in any British mind.
The Review invariably kept a second man at the heart of things to cover the routine, so that Routledge could follow his inclinations for hard-riding and bring in his wondrous tales of far chances, night attacks, the enemy at first hand, the faces and valor of the few who hearkened to the swish of the Reaper, the scream from inert flesh as the spirit flees away—the humor, the horror, the hell of the clash.
It is an axiom of the craft that in a platoon fighting for its life there is all the grip of human interest that appals in the collision of fifty-mile battle-fronts; and Routledge played the lesser game to the seeds. It was said of him that he could crawl into the soldier’s brain and watch the machinery falter in full blast and break down. Always you felt, as you read him, that he had a great pity for the ranker, and a great hate for the system that used him.
Where the Terrible was involved, there was a jolting energy in the descriptive powers of Routledge. Even the type which bore his messages from the field to the streets of London seemed sometimes vivid, crackling characters snapped hot from the reeking centres of war. He could make his first lines stand out in the thick Review columns like a desert sunset.
At the end of a campaign, instead of seeking the seductions of hero-worshipping London, Routledge would drift, possibly disguised, into some Indian hot-bed, there to study language, occultism, Borgian poisons, or Cleopatran perfumes. Tales of his ways and his work took the place of his presence at home in times of peace. Some traveller coming in from afar would relate how Routledge had smiled through a six-day water-famine; how Routledge had missed the native knives which find so often the source of human fountains in the dark. It was whispered, and accredited, that the Brahmins called him One; that they remembered him as great and distinguished and of sacerdotal caste in some former incarnation, and were loyal still. This is an honor so great that there are not five score men in all the occident who adequately can appreciate it. Mother India is sensitive to the warming currents of a great man, even though he be a derelict in the world.
Routledge had made the English-speaking world utter his name familiarly and to look for the same in public prints. For this reason, Finacune, with his typewriter on his lap, an American poncho spread upon the turf beneath him, his back against a stone, and a lantern at his elbow, rained a column upon his machine. Finishing the work with a half-smile, he hooted aloud: