Routledge rides alone

by Will Levington Comfort

“I’d rather be Noreen to you.”

“Noreen, what is the force of Rawder’s bigness to you?” Routledge asked, after watching her several seconds.

“He serves blindly, constantly, among the dregs, and has mercy for all men but himself!” she said intensely. “The living spirit of the Christ seems to be in him, and nothing of sex or earthly desire. I have pictured him, since you told me the story, as one pure of soul as any of the prophets or martyrs. I care not for the range of his brain when he has a human heart like that!... I wish I could say all he suggests to me, but I mean—I think he is close to God!”

“Thank you,” said Routledge. “It is one of the finest things I know, to have you speak of him as ‘our bravest man’—to share him with me.... Yes, I have seen him again, and there is another story to tell, and I will tell it, as he told me:

“It began with his leaving Hong Kong. He was never so weary nor so faint-hearted as on one certain day. It was about the time I was with you for an evening in Cheer Street. He declares when that night came he went out on the water-front to his work with a ‘wicked rebellion’ in his heart. A night of rain and storm. He had rescued a fallen sailor from the Chinese, and was leading him to his own lodging when he was struck from behind and trampled. ‘I’m afraid they meant to kill me,’ he divulged, and added in apology that the lives of the Chinese are so dark and desperate on the water-front. His old Minday wound was reopened, and he awoke to feel that death was very close. You see, the police had found his body in the rain. He was drifting off into unconsciousness when a vision appeared.

“He had never touched India at that time in this life, but it was a bit of India that appeared in his vision, and it was all very true to him.... Nightfall and a little village street; an ancient Hindu holy man sitting in a doorway, head bowed, his lips moving with the Ineffable Name. Very clearly Rawder saw this and the rest, so that he would know the place when he saw it again—the sand, the silence, the river sweeping like a rusty sickle about the town, and his old master sitting in the doorway.

“This was the picture that came to him as he lay in a station of the Hong Kong Sihk-police, and close to death.... The Hindu holy man, so old that he seemed to be a companion of Death, looked up sorrowfully and said: ‘My son, I have come down from the goodly mountains for you. Just this way, you shall find me waiting. Make haste to come for me, my chela, for I am full of years, and already am I weary of these plains and so many men. There is work for us to do before we go back together to our goodly mountains.’

“The Sannyasi spoke in Tibetan, which Rawder had never heard before, but every word he understood as I have told you. ‘And how swiftly did I heal after that!’ he exclaimed to me, smiling. His pain left him and his wound closed magically. They told him he would die if he left his bed, but he finished his healing on the road to his river and his village. All was made easy for him, as our bravest man declares. There was a ship in the harbor, which needed a man to peel vegetables, and Rawder fitted in, remaining aboard port after port, until something prompted him to go ashore at Narsapur, which lies among the mouths of the great Godavari. One of these he followed up to the main stem, and journeyed, on foot for months and months, studying the natives and their language, doing what appeared to him among the dead and the living in the midst of famine and plague, and ‘knowing no hunger nor thirst nor pain.’ These are his words, Noreen.”

“He is like one of those mystics,” the woman said, “like Suso or St. Francis of Assisi—who would not reckon with physical pain.”

“Yes.... I did not remain long in America after leaving you in Cheer Street. In fact, I was back in India months before this last trouble arose in Bhurpal—with Rawder in India. It was at Sironcha, where the Godavari joins the Penganga, that I found him, and he told me all these things. Then for awhile I journeyed with him, and it was very good for me. Always he was helping—down at the very roots of the disorder of things. I thought of you very much. You were the only one I had told of Rawder. That’s why I was so glad to hear you say ‘our bravest man.’”