Routledge rides alone

by Will Levington Comfort

“I remember he called me the ‘damaged archangel’ that night,” he added softly, and turned to Benton Day: “God be with him this night—and with you, too, lad—for you’ll need Him—to take his place.”

Jerry drank ceremoniously and alone, but there was a fuller tribute than any emptied glass ever tokened—in the brimming eyes of Noreen.... The boys were in the hall.

“I’m going—not to war, lads—but to bed,” Cardinegh said, and presently called after them at the door: “May the patchwork for peace fail to cover the knees of the nations!”

Noreen was alone. Her brain, sensitive from weariness and wounds, moved swiftly, restlessly. She knew at this moment the correspondents would be discussing the phases of her father’s madness—whispering at Tetley’s of the fall of the chieftain. Later, at the banquet-table, when the wines swept away all lesser regards, they would no longer whisper.... These men were her friends all. Not one would have hesitated to serve her well in any need. She did not want to do them an injustice; and yet there was something in their minds that was stinging and foreign now. The cause was in her own mind, and she realized it. They were big among men, big among their kind, honorable and genuine, but it was not in human reason for them to share her immutable trust, any more than they could share the feminine outpouring of her heart for the man afield. Also she knew that there were few things in this world that Routledge could have done wicked enough to shake these men so utterly from allegiance to him. He had been to them a mystical attraction of virtue, as he was now in their eyes the imperator among criminals.

She understood something of what her father had passed through in the recent hours. The sight of the Bookstalls boy had withered him like some disordered ghost; and yet, to her, there was a greater tragedy in watching her father try to hold his old place as chief at the table of war-men. He had not lost that king-torture of consciousness which showed him that he was not as he had been. His struggle to cast out the abiding fatuities, and to regain his old high place of mental activity, was terrible to witness—like the suspension of his faculties upon a cross.

Little could be added now to Noreen’s suffering. It is not given to one in the depths to realize what perfect soul-substance the recent months had brought her. The thought had come in her happier reactions, that if she were like other human beings, the patience, the self-control, and the purity of her yearning—this bearing all cleanly and without a cry—was great with tempering and expansion. But the hunger within her was deep and masterful for the end of it all. As never before, she felt the need of a human force to lean upon. There was neither priest nor pastor nor woman in her life. Her heart cried out for a greatness such as Routledge had suggested in Rawder. To her, their bravest man was a splendid, glowing picture of sorrows; before such a one she could have knelt and found healing, indeed.... And with what infinite content could she have knelt in this hour before the disciple of Rawder!

It is a dear but delicate thing to chronicle that matters of sex were practically untouched by the mind of the woman in so far as Routledge was concerned. Not at all did she despise these matters; nor is it to be inferred that she was one of those miraculous innocents who reach maturity with a mind virgin to the mysteries of creation. She had felt with a thrilling, exquisite sense the imperious young summer of her life, and all that throbbing veins and swift-running dreams mean under the steady stars.... But the call to her out of all creation—which was the voice of Routledge—was vital with a rounder and more wonderful vibrance.

One art of his that had found the heart of her was his conception of the inner loveliness of life. He caught the finer relation of things. He could love the lowliest, hunger with them, and realize in their midst the brotherhood of man. He perceived the great truths everywhere which purely physical men, of necessity, must miss. His discovery of Rawder was great with meaning to Noreen, and his adoration for those silent sacrifices which summed into a life of glory unobserved by the world. He could love India without hating England. He could be the greatest of war-scribes and despise war. He laughed at material possessions and bowed before breech-clout chivalry. He had witnessed processes of life and death in their most cruel, intricate, and abominable manifestations, but had preserved his optimism. This, which so many words are required even to suggest—and which is covered in the single expression, soul growth—was the rousing, irresistible appeal of Routledge to the woman whose spiritual age was sufficient to respond to it.

The man’s intellect—in contrast to the enchanting mystic element of his mind—compelled, stimulated, and enfolded her own. When Routledge talked, such a sympathy was aroused within her that she could watch the play of scenes before his eyes, the tithe of which only he told. In all that he had said and written she found the same smooth-running, high-powered intelligence. She had never touched his limitations, therefore infinity could hold no greater delights. She loved the harmony of his talents and the sterling, one-pointed direction of a man whose life is apart from the complicated lives of modern men. All dimensions of knowledge were in his mind; and yet its surfaces were free from taints and scar-tissue, preserved with virginities. His thoughts had that firm delicacy of the strong, and some of his thoughts had ripened in mystic suns and rains.

Once she had been but one of many champions of the man and his work. From time to time under his name, the Review had ignited London. The men of his world and hers had granted his supremacy as a picture-maker of war—and yet to her this was one of his lesser attractions. She loved to look into his conception of things back of the words. How pitiably often were the words shaped to meet the so-called needs of a daily paper, as the bones of a Chinese foot are crushed into a thimble. It was the master behind the narrator; the man who lived and moved in a wonderland that was a hopeless arcanum to the many; the man who glimpsed the temple of truth, if not from within, at least from the gardens—it was he who fascinated the woman. And since she loved him, she was proud that his intelligence enfolded her own.