Routledge rides alone

by Will Levington Comfort

The half had never been told before. Routledge bowed before the great devotion of this simplest and holiest man the world had shown him. In a swift gesture Rawder’s hand had passed between the eyes of the correspondent and the candle-flame. Fragile, trembling, almost transparent, it was eloquent with a beauty Routledge had never noted before. Within himself great changes were enacting.

There was power in that little Rydamphur hut, power from the hidden wells of creation. It was made clear to him what force had impelled Sekar to find his chela. There was karma still for the ancient Hindu to work out, since he dragged his weary, grave-hungering flesh down from the peace and purity of his mountains to the burning plains of men—to take back this whitest soul of the Occident.

“Rawder,” Routledge said slowly, reverently, “It has long been a big part of my understanding—what you mean to me. I once told a lady of you—of my bravest man—and this lady watches and listens for you across the world. That I go back into battle again is quite right and inevitable. I have not yet reached Mother Earth’s graduating class. The wound which you foretell is nothing. It is good that I am to see you once more—even in the Leper Valley—though it holds you longer than I thought from the rest you have earned. As for parting, you know better than I that the word has no meaning. You know better than I that the relations between master and disciple do not end with the body, nor the relations of friend and friend. There never has lived a pure great soul, who has not glimpsed what means the emancipation from the flesh, and discerned in his high moments such joys that the strength of his soul was sternly tried in the effort to live out his allotted days. If such glimpses were given to all men, the nations would suffer from a shock of suicide such as no war nor famine ever wrought.

“We will both go gladly to our work. I see my mission clearly to-night. It is to scoff at war before men; to show what a monstrous activity it is for men; to show how black is the magic of the ambitious few, who dare to make cannon-meat of God’s multitudes. I, the watcher of many services, who am supposed to bow before the battle-lines, and carve my career from their triumphs and defeats, shall laugh at their untimely and ridiculous manifestations. At the last, I shall paint war so red, so real, in all its ghastly, abortive reality, that the nations shall shudder—as at the towering crime on Calvary—shudder to the quick of their souls, and sin no more!”

The moment was exalted. Something vaster, nobler, than mere human consciousness expanded within Routledge.... He saw the pitiful pawns thronging to fill the legions of Cæsar, who stooped to learn the names of certain of his centurions. He saw that black plague, Napoleon, and the regiments herding for slaughter under his glaring, spike-pointed eye; great masses of God-loved men vying to die swiftly at a word from that iron-rimmed cavern of desolation, Napoleon’s mouth—the mouth which deigned to utter from time to time the names of chiefs he counted upon presently to murder. Cæsar and Napoleon, incarnates of devilish ambition, mastodons of licensed crime, towering epileptics both.... He hungered for the time when the world would learn to bottle such admirable concentrates of hell-poison before they shamed humanity by driving poor group-souled masses first mad and then into the ignoble death of war.

“It has been a high night to me, Rawder,” Routledge said. “I am proud to thank you for showing me my work. And I can see yours on and on—even to the Leper Valley.... Strange, Rawder, but there is a picture with it, in my mind—a picture that has always come to me in high, hard moments.... Nightfall—a land of hills and heat, and a dusty, winding highway. The Christ passes in the midst of a throng. He is weary, athirst, and hungering. The empty voices of the crowd bind His thoughts to misery. The pitiful ways of men have put a martyrdom of sadness in His heart. At length above the whispering of feet on the warm sand, above the Babel of the followers, comes to His ear alone a moan from the darkness. It thrills with agony. He leaves the highway. The throng understands. They pull at His garments and cry, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ Even the leper lying in the darkness warns Him, ‘Unclean!’ as is the law.... But the beautiful Christ bends with the touch of healing!...

“I shall come to find you in the Leper Valley, my bravest man. And you shall go on after that to the great peace that is ‘mortised and tenoned’ in the granite of the Hills!... But, Rawder, you shall look back out of the glorious amplitude beyond the Leper Valley to find at last that your friend is nearly ready. Perhaps you will come for him—even as Sekar came for you.”

With a quick intaking of breath, the material consciousness of the Hindu returned.

“It is the hour,” he said to his chela. “We travel in the night.”

Again the fleeting look of agony across the white face of Rawder, but Routledge gripped his shoulder, and spoke to Sekar: