The many tarry in the tinsel gardens of sense; the few turn back before the roar of the Furies; the One—but who can tell how the bay-tree blooms for him, where glory waits?...
The saddest part of all is, that those who are called and turn back, learn in the coolness of years how treacherous are the enchantments, and that never a dragon of the dark harmed a hair of Strongheart; but the way shines not so clear for a second journey, and the soul is hardened with skepticisms past responding to the Inner Voice. The man must be born again.
Routledge sat in his old leathern chair and looked back a little sorrowfully upon the boy of twelve years ago, all clean from the dust of the world’s trails, uncalloused by war, sensitive to the spirit, stirring in the chrysalis of flesh, all lit with star-stuff!... If only he had known Noreen Cardinegh then!... He could look deeply within. He did not love the manner of man he saw in himself—a wanderer striding over the East; sitting down often for a year, in the places white men choose most ardently to avoid, and devoting himself (who dared look back wistfully now upon those beginnings of spiritual life) to the reddest ructions of Matter—war, red war.
He shook his head bitterly, rose, and went to the window, looking down upon thronging Bookstalls with unseeing eyes. Out of it all came this at last:
“No, Routledge-san, you have given your reddest blood and whitest fire to old Mother Asia. Would it be fair and clean of you to yoke the remnant—and such an earthy remnant—with the lofty purity of Noreen Cardinegh?”
Long he stood there in the depths of thinking, until startled by the softly uttered name:
“Routledge-san.”
He was sure his own lips had not formed the syllables. He wondered if it had winged across the city from Cheer Street.... His glance fell to the road. Below, and a little to the right he perceived the White Mustache. Routledge seized his hat and descended quickly, but the stranger was gone. For a half-hour he tried to trap the other into a meeting, but in vain. It was after mid-day and raining. He had intended to go to the Review office, but the old leathern chair and the friendly lodging lured him back. To-morrow would do for the Review. To-night, the Army and Navy reception. Everybody he knew would be there.... She had asked him to come to Cheer Street, but he could not bring himself to break in upon old Jerry’s home-coming. He stirred the fire and fell to musing again in the glow.
FIFTH CHAPTER
ROUTLEDGE STEPS OUT SPIRITEDLY IN THE FOG TO FIND HIS FRIENDS AND ENCOUNTERS THE HATE OF LONDON
Routledge left his lodgings a little before nine that night, and breasted the February fog in his great frieze coat. He was minded to hail a cab when he wearied of walking, but the time and distance were put behind with a glow and a gradually quickening pace. It was a good four miles from Bookstalls to Trafalgar Square and the Armory where the Army and Navy reception was held. He skirted Hyde Park, now in the zenith of its season, and glimpsed Piccadilly again. Its full electric bloom was a ghastly sheen in the fog. London, the old and blackened brick Mammoth, was sweet to him, even now vaporing in her night-sweat.... He had thought of these shops, clubs, lights, smells, and monuments in the long, heaven-clear Indian nights. Afar in the Himalayas, where the old Earth-mother strains hungrily toward the stars (as does the soul of man who broods in those austere heights), he had thought hard upon these stirring pavements and yearned for them in red moments of memory. In the rice-lands of Rangoon; in the cotton country Bombayward; in the bazaars of Lahore; overlooking the plains from Simla; in the under-world of Calcutta, and the house-tops of Benares—he had mapped these streets in reflection and colored certain land-marks with desire.