Routledge rides alone

by Will Levington Comfort

The other regarded him intently a moment, as if deliberating whether it were wise to go a bit farther. He studied the deep and honest interest in the perspiring face, and caught up the question afresh:

“India, the best of India, has lost from her blood that which makes for war and commercial conquests. She is the longest suffering of all the nations. She asks only for peace. Those great playthings of the more material powers—navies, soldiery, colonies, armament—she cannot appreciate, cannot understand. India is not cowardly. You would not call an old man a coward because he rebukes with a smile a young brute who has struck him. Old mystic India prefers to starve rather than to outrage her philosophy with war. She has even adjusted her philosophy to the spectacle of her children starving, rather than to descend to the outgrown ugliness of physical warfare. It has been work of mine to study the nations somewhat, and I have come to think of them as human beings at different ages.... Look at young Japan—the sixteen-year-old among the powers! A brown-skinned, black-eyed boy, cruel, unlit from within, formidable, and itching to use again the strength he has once felt. To the boy-brain, supremacy at war is the highest victory the world can give. Japan has the health of a boy, heals like an earth-worm, and blazes with pride in the possession of his first weapons. Like the boy again, he is blind to the intrinsic rights of women. Shamelessly, he casts his women out over the seven seas to fill the brothels of every port—breeds human cattle to feed the world’s lusts, and knows no prick of pride—but watch him run hot-breathed to the rifle-pits if so much as a bit of humor from an outside nation stirs the restless chip upon his shoulder! Brute boy, Japan, the trophies of conquests are as yet but incidents to him. The soldier is in highest manifestation; the expansionist not yet weaned. He fights for the great glory of the fight—mad with the direct and awful lust of standing in the midst of the fallen....

“America?... Yes, I am an American. America is thirty-five, as I see her, and her passion is for the symbol of conquest, Dollars. America is self-tranced by looking into money, as those who gaze at crystal. The dollar-toxin riots in her veins. All the corrosion of the cursed Hebraic propensity for the concrete, appears to be the heritage of America. She is amassing as men never amassed before. She is lean from garnering, so terrifically beset with multiples and divisors that she has not even learned the material usages of money—how to spend gracefully. One night an American is a profligate prince; the next day a scheming, ravening, fish-blooded money-changer to pay for it. So busy is America collecting the symbols of possession, that she has little time to turn her thoughts to war, though she has by no means yet lost her physical condition. Having whipped England once, and purged herself with an internecine struggle, America now believes that she has only to drop her ticker, her groceries, and her paper continents, snatch up the rifle and cartridge-belt—to whip the world. Just a case of necessity, you know, and Grants and Lees and Lincolns will arise; labor turn into militia, and the land a sounding-board of trampling invincibles. But war is not the real expression of America in this young century. Financial precedence over one’s neighbor, vulgar outward flaunts of opulence, lights, noise, glitter, show—these are the forms of expression in vogue—concrete evidences of a more or less concrete accumulation. The excesses of America are momentary in contrast to the steady glut-glut of big-belted Europe. Of her glory I do not speak, of her humor, her inventions. It is this low present propensity—that is hard to bear. So rich still are America’s national resources that she has found no need of an India yet. May she put on wisdom and sweetness while the evil days come not—God bless her!...

“Look at England—fat and fifty, overfed, short of breath, thickening in girth, deepening in brain. England building her ships to fatten in peace; talking much of war to keep the peace, but far beyond the zest and stir of trumpets. England, entered upon her inevitable period of physical decadence, boasting of conquests, like a middle-aged man with rheum in his eye, the clog of senility under his waist-coat, stiffness in his joints, and the red lights of apoplexy bright upon his throat—who throws out his chest among his sons and pants that he is ‘better than ever, e’gad!’ England, sensuous in the home, crowding her houses like a squirrel’s nest in the frosts; an animated stomach, already cultivating and condimenting her fitful but necessary appetites; wise and crafty in the world, but purblind to her own perversions and lying in the rot of them.... England, who will not put away boyish things and look to God!... She is draining India as Rome drained Gaul, as Spain drained Mexico, and accelerating the bestiality which spells ruin—with the spoils.... What a sweet and perfect retaliation if Gaul could only have seen the monstrous offspring of the Cæsars; if the Aztecs had only endured to see what befell Spain after the Noche Triste; if India—but did not India point out in her philosophy the wages of national, vampirism—before Cortez and before the Cæsars?

“Then, if I am not wearying you, we might look at Russia, sundering in the pangs of wretched age. Mad, lesioned, its body a parliament of pains, its brain vaporing of past glories in its present ghastliness of disintegration.

“And India, I see a difference here. All men as all nations must suffer. Europe and America are learning to suffer through their excesses; India through her privations, a cleaner, holier way.... I think of India as an old widow who has given away her possessions to a litter of Gonerils and Absaloms—put away all the vanities of conquest and material possessions—a poor old widow with gaunt breasts and palsied hands, who asks only a seat in the chimney-corner, and crumbs from the table of the world!... She has still kept a smile of kindliness for the world, as she sits in the gloom, her soul lifting to the stars....

“After all, famine blinds us, because we are here in the midst of it. It is hard to restrain one’s rebellion in the midst of Rydamphur’s dead, when one thinks that the Englishman spends for intoxicating drinks annually two-and-one-half-times what the Hindu individual spends for food, drink, fuel, clothing, medicine, recreation, education, and religion. It horrifies us little to think that at home they are spending on roaring Broadway, this very night, in dines and wines and steins, and kindred vanities and viciousness, enough to keep a million native mothers in milk for their babes a fortnight. If we could sit away up in the Hills so that all the world were in its proper relation and perspective, we might perceive something sanitive and less sodden in starvation, something less pestilential than the death of drink and gluttony. You know the soul burns bright at the end of much fasting.”

The tall stranger had spoken mildly in the main, as if discussing matters of food before him. Only occasionally he leaned forward, his eyes lit with prophecy or rebellion. Mr. Jasper felt the animation of the other’s presence most remarkably. He had never met such a man, and said so with boyish impulsiveness.

The other regarded him with genuine gratitude. “I was afraid that I had spoken too freely. One is inclined to be fluent in the thing he knows well. I do not mean to say that I know India, but only that I have studied India long. She has many facets, and at best one’s views are but one’s own.”

Mr. Jasper offered his card.