Routledge rides alone

by Will Levington Comfort

The next morning, and thrice in the week following, Noreen Cardinegh drove to Bookstalls and threaded the unkempt way up and down in vain for the boy. She had failed to learn the name of the pastry-cook who employed him, and it would have been her last thought to seek him in the house of Routledge’s lodgings. Though a familiar in Bookstalls, he was an unfiled human document of the ancient highway; and always she returned to Cheer Street profitless.... It would be merciless to question her father; and yet he seemed to divine her anxiety to find the boy, and to fear her success as a visitation of death. It was hard for her to see him, the man whose courage had been a point of British comment for forty years, white, shaken, and exhausted from suspense when she returned from Bookstalls. Still, he dared not ask if she had seen the boy; and she did not confess that she had been searching.

Her only line on the mystery was to this effect: Routledge, though innocent, was blamed by England for some appalling, unmentionable crime, openly unpunishable. Her father and a few others knew the specific charge. Routledge had not known this at the Armory, but knew it the morning afterward. Meanwhile, her father and Johnny Brodie had been with him. All the boy’s actions denoted that he knew something, possibly a great deal in a fragmentary way, which she might be able to piece together into an illumination. He must have known something, since he apparently had been pledged to silence. At all events, he was lost.

It must be understood that Noreen’s conviction of her father’s integrity had never been shaken. It was more than a family faith. His life had been as a record accessible to all men. It did not even occur to her to build a system of reasoning upon the hypothesis of any guilt of his, even though much was strange and foreboding. She had heard her father mutter that a war would bring Routledge out of his lair. She could not forget that her father had come back from India on the day of the Reception, all consumed and brain-numbed from strain. For a moment in her arms he had broken completely—acting like one who was to be dragged from her to the gallows. The next morning, after his return to Cheer Street from Routledge, the tension was gone.

Comparative peace had endured, with only an occasional restless interval, until the sight of the Bookstalls boy had filled him with inexplicable dread. His condition when she returned from her fourth journey to Bookstalls was such that she determined not to go again. One of two results was inevitable if this devouring tension was not speedily relaxed—utter insanity or swift death. One more circumstance in this connection intensified the mystery, even though it gave her gladness—her father’s toast to the outcast, the toast that was drunk alone. He was without that poisonous personal hatred which the others manifested toward Routledge. All these thoughts had worn grooves in her mind from much passing, but they did not evolve her father’s shame.

Throughout the week, the correspondents had dropped in by twos and threes to bid them good-by. Negotiations were at a dead-lock, and the London dailies wanted their men on the spot for eventualities. Most of the men were going west to the Far East—the twenty-five day route, via America. Some one, however, mentioned Suez, and the name was on Jerry Cardinegh’s lips for an entire afternoon. At dinner his idea broke into words:

“Come, deere, we must pack to-night. We’re off to-morrow for Japan on the P. & O. liner, Carthusian. We can smell the ruction in Japan—and it’s a good place to live. London—aye, God, the old town is murdering me!”

She had thought of it many times, but until last week her father had been happy in Cheer Street, entirely immune to the war ferment. Noreen understood what had turned London into an iron pressure—one little boy, lost in din and fog and multitudes. She was glad to go away.

The first few days at sea helped her father, but the improvement did not last. They travelled very leisurely, sometimes stopping over a ship in different ports. It was with a quickened heart that the woman saw the Indian coast again after several years. Routledge was intricately identified with the India of her mind now, and she knew that somewhere in India he was living out his exile. Always in those days and nights of watching and labor with the sleepless old man who was leaving her hourly, with the accelerated speed of a river that nears its falls, she was thrilled with the hope that Bombay or Madras or Calcutta would give her some living word of the outcast. She hardly hoped to see Routledge; but with a triple hunger she yearned to hear that he lived, even to hear his name uttered by some one in whom the mystery had inspired hatred.... But the Indian ports furnished nothing concerning Routledge. They revived, however (and in her maturity), the half-formed impressions of her girlhood on the Anglo-Indians and their life. To observe and despise certain aspects of the ruling people was as certain a heritage from her father as was that fairer evolution of the spirit with which she had been blest by some elder lineage.

The English at Home, Noreen had ever regarded with a mental reservation, or two; and with those telling, divining eyes which are not rarely filled with Irish light. She had repressed and even tried to root out an instinctive animus for certain monuments and institutions large in British life; she tried constantly to shut her eyes to that quarry of self-infatuation, perdition deep, from which these monuments and institutions were carved. She came to triumph over her critical impulses at home, partly because her incisive barbs were dulled by constant contact and repetition—but India again after the few vital years of growth!... Londoners might forget themselves for an hour or two a day on the Thames. They allowed it to be taken for granted an hour or two a day at Home that they were English. In India, they were more English than the English.

It must not be forgotten that Noreen Cardinegh’s mind was the arena of interminable rebellion against the banishment of Routledge. All Englishmen of rank arrayed themselves in contrast to him. She knew that this was wrong, useless; that the energy which spent itself in contrasting to the disfavor of the English, reacted with a hurt to her own finest nature, but she could not help it now. As a daughter of Jerry Cardinegh, she could not be free from something of his passion; moreover, body and brain, she was spent in his service. There were vast areas of unhealed tissue within her—the agony of a daughter of strong devotion, and the agony of a woman whose romance is mined and countermined. So it was a weary and supersensitive nature that caught its new series of impressions of Anglo-Indian life—the life of pegs and chits; men moving in a circle like those lost in the woods; men speaking of their livers as of members of the family; hot, heavy dinners; the religious, life-and-death ceremony of eating and drinking; the arrogant assumption of superiority over the native, and each separate foreigner a cyst of the great British drain! Such were the men of the Indian ports to whom the name of Cosmo Routledge was as black magic. It all came back to her like an ugly dream, and it is not strange that she returned speedily to her ships to cleanse herself from her thoughts in the prophylactic sea-winds.