Routledge rides alone

by Will Levington Comfort

The great law of cause and effect had brought the answer to his whimsical question of a few hours before. Why did karma inflict starvation upon the child before the tablets had formed within him on which the lesson might be graven for his life’s direction? The son of Madan Das was but an instrument of punishment for the mother.... What wrong she must have done, according to Hindu doctrine, to him in one of the dim other lives—when she was forced to bring him into the world, the famine-world of India, forced to love him, to watch him waste with hunger, and to crawl with him in the night. Incomparable maternal tragedy. The sins of how many lives had she not expiated up yonder in the withered fields!

The woman’s arm flung itself out from her body, and lay in a checkered patch of sunlight. It made Routledge think of a dried and shrunken earth-worm which the morning heat had overtaken upon a wide pavement. Her eyelids were stretched apart now.

Sierras of tragedy are pictured in the eyes of the starving. Processes of decay are intricate and marvellous—like the impulses of growth and replenishing. There is no dissolution which so masterfully paints itself in the human eye as Hunger. The ball is lit with the expiration of the body, filled with a smoky glow of destroying tissue. The unutterable mysteries of consummation are windowed there. The body dies, member by member; all flesh save the binding fibres wastes away, and the hideous hectic story of it all is told in the widening, ever widening eyes—even to the glow of the burning-ghats—all is there.

And the mother’s eyes! She was already old in the hunger-lesson. The husband, Madan Das; the leper, his brother; the two little girls; the little brass bowl—all were gone, when this child ceased to feed upon the mother’s flesh. And still she crawled with the last of her body to the town—all for this little son of Madan Das, who slept the sleep of healing within reach of her arm.

Routledge gazed upon the great passion of motherhood. In truth, the little hut in Rydamphur had been to him a place of unfolding revelations. He had seen much of death in wars, but this war was so poignant, so intimate.... Why did the woman sin? Routledge’s tired brain forged its own answer on the vast Hindu plan of triple evolution. Countless changes had carried this creature, as he himself had been carried, up from a worm to a human. It is a long journey begun in darkness, and only through error, and the pains of error, does the soul-fragment learn to distinguish between the vile and the beautiful. In the possession of refining senses, and the travail of their conquering, the soul whitens and expands. Often the wild horses of the senses burst out of control of the charioteer of the soul; and for each rushing violence, the price must be paid in pangs of the body—until there are no longer lessons of the flesh to be learned, and the soul puts on its misery no more.... Routledge came up to blow, like a leviathan, from the deeps of reflection, and wondered at the feverish energy of his brain. “I shall be analyzing presently the properties which go into the crucible for the making of a prophet,” he declared.

The servant had brought a doctor, but it was mere formality. Routledge bent over the dying woman. Her heart filled the hut with its pounding. It ran swift and loud, like a ship’s screw, when the clutching Pacific rollers fall away. In that devouring heat, the chill settled.

“Do not forget.... He is the son of Madan Das, and I am his mother——”

“I shall not forget, good mother,” Routledge whispered. “A worthy man shall take care of him. This, first of all, shall I attend.”

“Madan Das was a worthy man——”

The rest was as the rattle of ripe seeds in a windblown pod.... Routledge turned his face from the final wrench. There was a foot-fall in the sand, and a shadow upon the threshold, but Routledge raised his hand for silence. The moment of all life in the flesh when silence is dearest is the last.... The child stirred and opened its eyes—roused, who can tell, by its own needs of a metaphysical sympathy? And what does it matter? The man covered in the sheet the poor body which the soul had spurned, and turned to feed the child again. The American was at the door.